Determinism and variability of the morphogenesis pathways

Abstract

Along with a strict determinism of early embryogenesis in most living organisms, some of them exhibit variability of cell fates and developmental pathways. Here we discuss the phenomena of determinism and variability of developmental pathways, defining its dependence upon cell potency, cell sensitivity to the external signals and cell signaling. We propose a set of conjectures on the phenomenon of variability of developmental pathways, and denote a difference between a normal (local) variability, leading to an invariant final structure (e.g., embryo shape), and fundamental one, which is a switching between different developmental pathways, leading to different possible structures.For illustrating our conjectures, we analyzed early developmental stages of plant embryos with different levels of variability of morphogenesis pathways, and provide a set of computational experiments by Morphogenesis Software.