Construct · 1 fields · 2 citations

morphogen: a standalone construct

One name. One construct. A landmark on the map.

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morphogen1 CONSTRUCTMorphogenTURING · MORPHOGEN

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Developmental biology

The gradient-forming signal that patterns tissue by position

Alan Turing's 1952 paper The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis coined the term morphogen for a chemical substance that diffuses through a developing tissue and, by reacting with other substances, sets up spatial patterns of concentration that the tissue can use to decide how its cells will differentiate. Lewis Wolpert's 1969 account of positional information gave the idea its now-standard form: a morphogen forms a graded concentration profile across a field of cells, and each cell reads the local concentration as a coordinate that tells it where it sits and therefore what to become. In developmental biology a morphogen is thus a signaling molecule, often a secreted protein such as a member of the Hedgehog, Wnt, or BMP families, whose graded distribution carries positional information, so that one diffusing signal can specify several distinct cell fates along an axis according to concentration thresholds. What marks it as a landmark construct is this economy: it explains how a small number of gradients can organise the reproducible, ordered anatomy of an embryo from an initially near-uniform sheet of cells.[1][2]

Unit
A diffusible signaling molecule defined by a graded concentration profile that specifies cell fate by position
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Identified experimentally by mapping a molecule's concentration gradient and showing that distinct cell fates arise at defined concentration thresholds, using mutant, transplant, and reporter assays

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Nearby constructs

gradient4 fields · 4 citationsjingle · one word, four constructssignal5 fields · 5 citationsjingle · one word, five constructsdiffusion6 fields · 12 citationsjingle · one name, six constructs

References

  1. Turing, A. M. (1952). The chemical basis of morphogenesis. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 237(641), 37–72. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.1952.0012
  2. Wolpert, L. (1969). Positional information and the spatial pattern of cellular differentiation. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 25(1), 1–47. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5193(69)80016-0

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