Morphogenetic Dynamics in Tissues: Expectations of Developmental and Cell Biologists

Abstract

The idea of the participation of mechanical forces and stresses (balanced forces) in the development of organisms has more than a century of history (His 1874, Thompson 1942). Until quite recently it has resided, with few exceptions, at the very periphery of developmental biology. Although almost nobody denied, in principle, the role of mechanical components in such developmental processes as gastrulation, neurulation, etc. (to say nothing about plant development), these have been considered as trivial epiphenomena, having nothing in common with the more fundamental problems of embryonic determination (speaking in terms of classical embryology) or of the regulation of gene activity (in more modern terms).