LAUSR

The ability to progress from simple to more complex, organized, and spatially differentiated forms, or morphogenesis, is, perhaps, one of the most fundamental properties of biological systems from individual cells to large multicellular organisms, to whole populations. Customarily, cell biology is concerned with the morphogenesis of individual cells, while developmental biology studies morphogenesis on the scales of tissues and whole organisms. We envision that the Section “Patterning and Morphogenesis” will take on the challenge of unifying these efforts focusing on their integration based on the common organizing principles. Historically, patterning and morphogenesis has been a fundamentally multidisciplinary area of research that experienced influences of many scientific disciplines outside of biology, i.e., physics, chemistry, and mathematics. Therefore, one of our goals will be to foster this spirit of multidisciplinarity and encourage contributions from classical experimental research as well as from more quantitative and theoretical fields. Even when the development of tools allowing appropriate experimental approaches to complex cellular and molecular activity was still in its infancy, theoretical models were already proposed to account for the formation of complex and highly specific morphological features. Many influential ideas generated by the twentieth century giants, such as Alan Turing, Conrad Waddington, and Lewis Wolpert, have become even more exciting now, when we can actually observe and experimentally perturb their manifestations in living biological systems.