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Efforts to use regenerative medicine—which seeks to address ailments as diverse as birth defects, traumatic injury, aging, degenerative disease, and the disorganized growth of cancer—would be greatly aided by solving one fundamental puzzle: How do cellular collectives orchestrate the building of complex, three-dimensional structures?
While genomes predictably encode the proteins present in cells, a simple molecular parts list does not tell us enough about the anatomical layout or regenerative potential of the body that the cells will work to construct. Genomes are not a blueprint for anatomy, and genome editing is fundamentally limited by the fact that it’s very hard to infer which genes to tweak, and how, to achieve desired complex anatomical outcomes. Similarly, stem cells generate the building blocks of organs, but the ability to organize specific cell types into a working human hand or eye has been and will be beyond ...
