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Published May 2011 | public
Journal Article

Morphogens, nutrients, and the basis of organ scaling

Abstract

The regulation of organ size is a long-standing problem in animal development. Studies in this area have shown that organ-intrinsic patterning morphogens influence organ size, guiding growth in accordance with positional information. However, organ-extrinsic humoral factors such as insulin also affect organ size, synchronizing growth with nutrient levels. Proliferating cells must integrate instructions from morphogens with those from nutrition so that growth proceeds as a function of both inputs. Coordinating cell proliferation with morphogens and nutrients ensures organs scale appropriately with body size, but the basis of this coordination is unclear. Here, the problem is illustrated using the Drosophila wing—a paradigm for organ growth and size control—and a potential solution suggested.

Additional Information

© 2011 Wiley. I thank Peter Lawrence, Ricardo Neto-Silva, Richard Poole, Gary Struhl, Andrew Tomlinson, and two anonymous reviewers for their critical reading of this manuscript. Gary Struhl provided the duplicated wing in Fig. 1. This work was supported by a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 18, 2023