Figure 1. Construction of spatiotemporal gene expression profile and prediction of cell position. (A) A virtual reference embryo model of C. elegans was constructed at the developmental stage of 4 to 345 cells. (B-C) The direct cell-cell interaction relationships were identified by generating Voronoi diagrams with the cell coordinates in 2- and 3-dimmensional space, at the early 4-, 36- and the later 345 cell stages. (D) The workflow of the analysis. involves two major steps, i) the construction of the spatiotemporal gene expression profile; and ii) correlative image analysis by spatiotemporal alignment of embryo cells. (E) The gene expression data in each embryo sample were log2-scaled, then normalized by using the Z-score method. (F) Given the gene expression profiles of the cells, the Random Forest Regression model was trained which predicted accurately the cell positions along the Ventral-Dorsal (Pearson correlation score = 0.874), the Medial-Lateral / Left-Right (Pearson correlation score = 0.877), and the Anterior-Posterior body axis (Pearson correlation score = 0.9) by 2-fold cross validation respectively.