A dynamical model of growth and maturation in Drosophila

The decision to stop growing and mature into an adult is a critical point in development that determines adult body size, impacting multiple aspects of an adult’s biology. In many animals, growth-cessation is a consequence of hormone release that appears to be tied to attainment of particular body size or condition. Nevertheless, the size-sensing mechanism animals use to initiate hormone synthesis is poorly understood. Here we develop a simple mathematical model of growth cessation in Drosophila melanogaster, which is ostensibly triggered by attainment of a critical weight early in the last instar. Attainment of critical weight is correlated with synthesis of the steroid hormone ecdysone, which causes a larva to stop growing, pupate and metamorphose into the adult form. Our model suggests that, contrary to expectation, the size-sensing mechanism that initiates metamorphosis occurs before the larva reaches critical weight; that is, the critical-weight phenomenon is a downstream consequen..., The experimental data were collected as detailed in B. C. Stieper, M. Kupershtok, M. V. Driscoll, A. W. Shingleton, Imaginal discs regulate developmental timing in Drosophila melanogaster. Dev Biol 321, 18 26 (2008). The simulated data were generated using the deposited XPP-Auto and Simulink/Matlab scripts. , , # A dynamical model of growth and maturation in Drosophila

The data comprise experimental data used to parametrize the model, and example simulations generated by the model. The experimental data are the relationship between body mass (mg) and time to pupariation (TTP) for fed and starved third-instar *Drosophila* larvae (experimental_data_fed.csv and experimental_data_stvd.csv). The simulated data are the simulated relationship between body mass and TTP for fed and starved larvae without scatter (simulated_data_fed_ln.csv and simulated_data_stvd_ln.csv) and with scatter (simulated_data_fed_sct.csv and simulated_data_stvd_sct.csv).

## Description of the data and file structure

All the data files contain two columns: one for body mass and a second for the time to pupariation in hours.

## Code/Software

The R-script (Tyson_et_al_analysis.R) is the code used to analyze these data using loess regression and segmented regression. Script was prepared and run on R version 4.0.3.

The XPP...