The geometry of morphogenesis and the morphogenetic field concept

Abstract

The process of morphogenesis, which can be defined as an evolution of the form of an organism, is one of the most intriguing mysteries in the life sciences. The discovery and description of the spatial-temporal distribution of the gene expression pattern during morphogenesis, together with its key regulators, is one of the main recent achievements in developmental biology. Nevertheless, gene expression patterns cannot explain the development of the precise geometry of an organism and its parts in space. Here, we suggest a set of postulates and possible approaches for discovering the correspondence between molecular biological information and its realization in a given geometry of an organism in space-time. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.