Early in development, all animal embryos pass through an almost identical stage where they form a blastoderm, which is a hollow ball of a few thousand cells. From that hollow ball, layers of cells start to fold into shapes that will become different parts of the body. Although the behavior of cells and the patterning of the embryo after the blastoderm stage is well-understood, how the blastoderm itself is made has remained a longstanding mystery.
Now, a team of biologists and applied mathematicians at Harvard University in Massachusetts have developed a framework for understanding the general principles by which cell nuclei move and arrange themselves during the earliest stages of embryonic development to form the blastoderm. In their research, which was published July 6 in Nature Communications, the researchers made specific predictions about how the blastoderm would form in a variety of insect eggs and validated them using mathematical models ...
