Coupled cycling and regulation of metazoan morphogenesis
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COMMENTARY
Coupled cycling and regulation of metazoan morphogenesis Saba Rezaei‑Lotfi1 and Ramin M. Farahani1,2*
Abstract Metazoan animals are characterized by restricted phenotypic heterogeneity (i.e. morphological disparity) of organ‑ isms within various species, a feature that contrasts sharply with intra-species morphological diversity observed in the plant kingdom. Robust emergence of morphogenic blueprint in metazoan animals reflects restricted autonomy of individual cells in adoption of fate outcomes such as differentiation. Fates of individual cells are linked to and influ‑ enced by fates of neighboring cells at the population level. Such coupling is a common property of all self-organising systems and propels emergence of order from simple interactions between individual cells without supervision by external directing forces. As a consequence of coupling, expected functional relationship between the constituent cells of an organ system is robustly established concurrent with multiple rounds of cell division during morphogen‑ esis. Notably, the molecular regulation of multicellular coupling during morphogenic self-organisation remains largely unexplored. Here, we review the existing literature on multicellular self-organisation with particular emphasis on recent discovery that β-catenin is the key coupling factor that programs emergence of multi-cellular self-organisation by regulating synchronised cycling of individual cells. Keywords: Cell cycle, β-Catenin, Synchronisation, Self-organisation Background Developmental morphogenesis describes cellular and molecular events that instruct the final shape and size of metazoan tissues/organs together with functional specialization of the constituent cells [1]. During morphogenesis, sequential rounds of mitosis subsequent to the formation of a zygote generate a homogenous population of totipotent cells that gradually and iteratively commit to their individual fates via differentiation [2]. The molecular basis of the differentiation program has been studied extensively and several models have been proposed in an attempt to explain the gradual commitment to differentiation of individual proliferating cells [2, 3]. It is generally believed that the morphogenic blueprint of an organism is *Correspondence: [email protected] 2 Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
genetically encoded and phenotypically interpreted at the level of individual cells. That is to say individual cells access their DNA and selectively retrieve the genetic information to drive differentiation in a stepwise manner during ontogeny. The basic tenet of such a centralized (i.e. cell-autonomous) model of morphogenesis is the assumption that the DNA content of individual cells in an organism is nearly identical. The emerging evidence, however, has started to portray a different image whereby significant genomic variability can exist bet
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