Publication Date:
2012-10-16
Description:
Animal bodies and the embryos that generate them exhibit an assortment of stereotypic morphological motifs that first appeared more than half a billion years ago. During development, cells arrange themselves into tissues with interior cavities and multiple layers with immiscible boundaries, containing patterned arrangements of cell types. These tissues go on to elongate, fold, segment, and form appendages. Their motifs are similar to the outcomes of physical processes generic to condensed, chemically excitable, viscoelastic materials, although the embryonic mechanisms that generate them are typically much more complex. I propose that the origins of animal development lay in the mobilization of physical organizational effects that resulted when certain gene products of single-celled ancestors came to operate on the spatial scale of multicellular aggregates.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Newman, Stuart A -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2012 Oct 12;338(6104):217-9. doi: 10.1126/science.1222003.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy, New York Medical College, Valhalla, NY 10595, USA. newman@nymc.edu〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23066074" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
*Biological Evolution
;
Body Patterning/*genetics
;
Chimerism/embryology
;
Cleavage Stage, Ovum
;
Invertebrates/embryology
;
Mutation
;
Physical Phenomena
;
*Physical Processes
;
Vertebrates/embryology
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
