This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for 1996. This fellowship supports research and training in the area of computational biology with studies in the area of animal developmental biology. The title of the research and training plan is "Controlling errors in embryological development." It is believed that the concentrations of spatially distributed chemicals cause the patterned differentiation of cells by causing differential responses in the genome. A mathematical model of this hypothesis will be used to evaluate the capacity of such a mechanism for suppression of the thermal fluctuations inherent in any concentration, a necessary condition for the precision of embryological patterning.
