Binary establishment and maintenance of discrete cell fates in development

During embryonic development, cells must ultimately adopt discrete fates. Positive autoregulation has been proposed as a general mechanism for establishing and maintaining these discrete cell-fate decisions. Here, we quantitatively dissect the role of autoregulation and bistability in establishing binary cellular fates in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Specifically, we apply recently developed single-cell live imaging techniques to quantify transcriptional and protein dynamics of the Drosophila pair-rule gene fushi tarazu as cells decide whether to commit to the expression of the gene.