How morphogenetic processes collectively achieve reproducible development

Determine how chemical-level pattern-formation processes (reacting and diffusing morphogens that regulate gene expression) and cellular-level processes (cell motion, cell division, unpolarised cell contractions, and differential adhesion) jointly interact to achieve reproducible morphogenesis of complex body shapes despite intrinsic stochasticity.

Background

The paper highlights that complex organismal morphologies are reproduced with high precision across generations, despite substantial noise in the underlying biochemical and biophysical processes at both chemical and cellular scales. While robustness mechanisms at the chemical level (e.g., morphogen gradients, feedbacks) have been extensively studied, less is known about cellular-level contributions and, critically, how the two scales coordinate to ensure reproducible outcomes.

This unresolved question motivates the authors’ non-prescriptive evolutionary modeling approach to test whether reproducible morphogenesis can emerge as a by-product of selection for complexity and to infer the organizing principles that could underlie such reproducibility. The open problem asks for a mechanistic account of the cross-scale interactions that yield robustness and reproducibility of complex morphologies.