Mechanisms of spontaneous self-organization in embryogenesis

Determine the physical and biological mechanisms by which living tissues such as embryos spontaneously self-organize into distinct yet robust structures during development, providing a comprehensive and predictive understanding of morphogenesis.

Background

Understanding how tissues self-organize into robust forms is a central goal of developmental biology. This process emerges from complex spatiotemporal interactions among many cells and their junction networks, making it challenging to predict and model at scale.

The paper frames this challenge as a major unsolved problem motivating their geometric deep learning approach, which aims to leverage unified multicellular representations to improve predictive capacity for morphogenesis.

References

How living tissues such as embryos spontaneously self-organize into distinct yet robust structures is the central question of developmental biology and one of the greatest unsolved problems.

— Multicell-Fold: geometric learning in folding multicellular life  (2407.07055 - Yang et al., 2024) in Main, opening paragraph of the introduction

It remains unknown whether coherent transformations between related anatomies correspond to compact, reusable directions in the distributed regulatory dynamics of the governing multicellular substrate of life, and how such directions could be inferred from anatomical outcomes.

— On Growth and Form, and Function: Reusable Regulatory Handles Control Phenotypic Variation  (2609.29755 - Hartl et al., 24 Sep 2026) in Section 1, Introduction