4 ms·

Original article: Roselló-Díez A., Madisen L., Bastide S., Zeng H., Joyner A.L. "Cell-nonautonomous local and systemic responses to cell arrest enable long-bon

• JPLeRouzic 8y ago
  Can someone having knowledge in this dark art: * tell what is the messaging system (I understand it is some kind of IGF peptides), * what are the semantics of the messaging system (how can it report about the length of a limb? how are identified senders and receivers?) * what is the controlling system (which compares the two limb lengths and corrects the lengths by sending other messages?) Many thanks!
  • dekhn 8y ago
    It's hard to answer these questions because you're asking like a human engineer how another rationally designed system "works" via agency and intent. Biology doesn't work that way. But yes: the data is signalled in the form of pools of individual molecules. The messaging system uses tags to target molecules (in some cases) or just controlled spatial relase to target the messages. The controlling system is a complex set of genetically regulated proteins and other components. See morte here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_communication_(biology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_communication_(biolog... None of this is fully understood but it has been extremely successful in explaining a lot of more complex developmental phenotypes.