Bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) belong to the TGFβ superfmily of proteins, and are known to be associated with essential biological processes such as embryogenesis and postnatal development and maintenance of bone. Canonical BMP signaling is initiated through the binding of BMPs to distinct BMP type-I and BMP type-II serine/threonine kinase receptors leading to the activation of receptor associated Smads (R-Smad) which transmit the BMP signal from the cytosol into the nucleus to regulate target gene expression. Interestingly, the regulation of level, position and time of the BMP signal is a result of a fine interplay among several extracellular and intracellular regulatory proteins. We aim to provide a mathematical model to study the mechanism of spatio-temporal regulation of BMP signaling. Our model will serve as an important tool that will facilitate the understanding of the BMP signaling cascade on a single cell level, and can later be extrapolated to cell-cell and tissue specific BMP signal regulation.
