Abstract
The major goal of developmental biology is to understand how the complex multicellular structure of an organism is built from a simple fertilized egg. Development is a complex and dynamic process that involves multicellular coordination of growth, cell-cell communication and cell movements, all in a 3D physical space. The ability to visualize cell and molecular level events in living embryos developed in recent years is bringing greater insight about the logic of the developmental processes. However, a comprehensive understanding of development usually requires the use of sophisticated computational models that simulate its dynamics and predict wild-type and mutant phenotypes. Building models that simulate morphogenetic processes, on the organ or even the whole embryo level, will play a decisive role to achieve a deep understanding of how organismal morphology originates and, ultimately, how it evolves.
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Marín-Riera, M., Brun-Usan, M. (2019). Can We Compute the Embryo?. In: Martín-Durán, J., Vellutini, B. (eds) Old Questions and Young Approaches to Animal Evolution. Fascinating Life Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18202-1_12
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