The Mechanisms of Embryonic Scaling

Resumo

The phenomenon of scaling, i.e., preserving the proportions of the embryo’s spatial pattern in dependence on its overall size, is the most prominent feature of the embryonic morphogenetic fields. Up to now, attempts to understand the mechanisms of scaling have been limited to the creation and analysis of the behavior of theoretical models that, to some extent, reproduce this phenomenon in silico. Only recently, when creating such models, scientists began to use experimental data on specific genes and their products (secreted proteins), which were identified during the study of various molecular mechanisms in embryogenesis. However, no approaches for the targeted identification of genes and proteins that are directly responsible for the embryonic scaling have been described in the literature so far. Developing such approaches and putting them into practice is an important task for future research. In this work, the main current publications on the problem of embryonic scaling and possible approaches to studying the mechanisms of this phenomenon are reviewed.