Morphogenesis as a macroscopic self-organizing process
Section snippets
Introduction: from classical to top-down causation
We define morphogenesis, in the broadest meaning of this term, as formation of new spatial structures during the development of organisms. Let us define any structure as a new one if its formation is associated with the changes (in most cases with the reduction) of a symmetry order. Our next step will be to classify these structures according to their spatial dimensions. What we see here first of all is a sharp distinction between two categories of structures: macroscopic, created by a
Morphomechanical feedbacks: models and experiments
A most general feature of morphogenesis is that it is associated with a series of symmetry breaks of embryonic bodies which, in the overwhelming majority of cases cannot be regarded as being imprinted from outside. Most obvious examples are the reductions of translational symmetry (metamerization: subdivision of a body into similar or non-similar parts); even if these events require any external inductors, the latter's symmetry order is always higher than that of the resulted structures. As
HR-based general morphomechanical scheme of early metazoans development
In this section we want to show that HR reactions until now described separately from each other can be combined into prolonged enough developmental successions. Moreover, we hope to demonstrate that such an approach gives new breath to the old idea of the developmental archetypes, postulating the existence of quite a restricted number of the main developmental pathways embracing at least in broad outlines the development of most Metazoans. More concrete, we would like to show the following:
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The
Cell differentiation: a place for self-organization and morphomechanics
By a routine view, cell differentiation is regarded as a classical cause-effect transition, unambiguously determined by specific molecular signals. It becomes increasingly evident however that such an interpretation greatly oversimplifies the real situation. As it was numerously shown (for a detailed analysis see Kupiec, 2009) an absolute specificity is lost already in the first steps of the signaling pathways and can be restored within a reacting cell only by a secondary selection of the
A brief review of unsolved problems
Although about one and a half century passed since a valiant Wilhelm His (1878) claim that the heredity without mechanics belongs to a “non-scientific mysticism”, a morphomechanics is making just its first steps and only few developmental problems has been properly analyzed from this point of view. Below is given a very brief list of unsolved problems. Most of them are dealing with morphomechanics of freely moving mesenchyme type cells. By many evidences, their developmental fates largely
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, grant # 11-04-01718.
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The drawbridge of nature: Evolutionary complexification as a generation and novel interpretation of coding systems
2021, BioSystemsCitation Excerpt :A biological system, by generating the homeorhetic non-equilibrium process, aims to exploit additional resources to maintain its living state. The principle of increased external work formulated by Bauer (1935) to explain complexification in evolution can be related to the principle of hyper-restoration that was introduced to explain morphogenetic phenomena by Beloussov (2008, 2012). The hyper-restoring feedback loops become feedforward engines driving complexification (see Igamberdiev, 2012, 2018 for details).