paper:doi-10-1002-dvdy-23770Normalized shape and location of perturbed craniofacial structures in the Xenopus tadpole reveal an innate ability to achieve correct morphology
Original abstract (expand)
BACKGROUND: Embryonic development can often adjust its morphogenetic processes to counteract external perturbation. The existence of self-monitoring responses during pattern formation is of considerable importance to the biomedicine of birth defects, but has not been quantitatively addressed. To understand the computational capabilities of biological tissues in a molecularly tractable model system, we induced craniofacial defects in Xenopus embryos, then tracked tadpoles with craniofacial deformities and used geometric morphometric techniques to characterize changes in the shape and position of the craniofacial structures. RESULTS: Canonical variate analysis revealed that the shapes and relative positions of perturbed jaws and branchial arches were corrected during the first few months of tadpole development. Analysis of the relative movements of the anterior-most structures indicates that misplaced structures move along the anterior-posterior and left-right axes in ways that are significantly different from their normal movements. CONCLUSIONS: Our data suggest a model in which craniofacial structures use a measuring mechanism to assess and adjust their location relative to other local organs. Understanding the correction mechanisms at work in this system could lead to the better understanding of the adaptive decision-making capabilities of living tissues and suggest new approaches to correct birth defects in humans.
Related work— refs + corpus + external arXiv
Cited / in-corpus / arXiv badges show which signals surfaced each row. Multi-source rows weighted higher.
- Global Perturbation of Initial Geometry in a Biomechanical Model of Cortical MorphogenesisXiaoyu Wang, Mariam Al Harrach, Mickael Dinomais, Fran\c{c}ois Rousseau, Julien Lef\`evre Amine Bohi2019≈ 74%
- Darwin's agential materials: evolutionary implications of multiscale competency in developmental biologyin corpus2023≈ 74%
- ≈ 73%
- Predicting Brain Morphogenesis via Physics-Transfer LearningYingjie Zhao and Yicheng Song and Fan Xu and Zhiping Xu2025≈ 73%
- The Neoplasia as embryological phenomenon and its implication in the animal evolution and the origin of cancer. I. A presentation of the neoplastic process and its connection with cell fusion and germline formationKay Saalfeld Jaime Cofre2026≈ 73%
- ≈ 73%
- Mechanics of Morphogenesis in Neural Development: in vivo, in vitro, and in silicoHamed Seyyedhosseinzadeh, Zheng Ao, Haning Xiu, Kun Gou, Feng Guo, and Zi Chen Joseph Sutlive2022≈ 73%
- Real time large scale $\textit{in vivo}$ observations by light-sheet microscopy reveal intrinsic synchrony, plasticity and growth cone dynamics of midline crossing axons at the ventral floor plate of the zebrafish spinal cordS{\o}ren S. L. Andersen2021≈ 72%
- The computational boundary of a 'self': developmental bioelectricity drives multicellularity and scale-free cognitionin corpus2019≈ 72%
- ≈ 72%
- Developmental Bioelectricity: the cognitive glue enabling evolutionary scaling from physiology to mindin corpus2023≈ 72%
- Basic principles drive self-organization of brain-like connectivity structureValeriy A. Makarov Slizneva, and Cees van Leeuwen Carlos Calvo Tapia2024≈ 72%
- ≈ 71%
- Remapping and navigation of an embedding space via error minimization: a fundamental organizational principle of cognition in natural and artificial systemsL\'eo Pio-Lopez, Chris Fields, Michael Levin Benedikt Hartl2026≈ 71%
- Spontaneous mechanical and energetic state transitions during Caenorhabditis elegans gastrulationGuoye Guan, Chao Tang Jiao Miao2022≈ 71%
- Endless forms most beautiful 2.0: teleonomy and the bioengineering of chimaeric and synthetic organismsin corpus2023≈ 71%
- Engineering morphogenesis of cell clusters with differentiable programmingFrancesco Mottes, Ariana-Dalia Vlad, Michael P. Brenner, Alma dal Co Ramya Deshpande2025≈ 71%
- Microelectronic Morphogenesis: Progress towards Artificial OrganismsDaniil Karnaushenko, Minshen Zhu and Oliver G. Schmidt John S. McCaskill2024≈ 71%
- ≈ 71%
- DiffeoMorph: Learning to Morph 3D Shapes Using Differentiable Agent-Based SimulationsGuoye Guan, Benjamin Fefferman, and Sahand Hormoz Seong Ho Pahng2026≈ 71%
- The biogenic approach to cognitionin corpus2005≈ 70%
- The World Inside Neural Networksin corpus2026≈ 69%
- ≈ 69%
- ≈ 69%
- Model Alignment Searchin corpus2025≈ 69%
- Self-Improvising Memory: A Perspective on Memories as Agential, Dynamically Reinterpreting Cognitive Gluein corpus2024≈ 69%
- Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substratesin corpus2024≈ 69%
- Zoom In: An Introduction to Circuitsin corpus2020≈ 69%
- ≈ 68%
- Mechanistic Knobs in LLMs: Retrieving and Steering High-Order Semantic Features via Sparse Autoencodersin corpus2026≈ 68%
Similar preprints — Semantic Scholar
Cited by (12)
- Developmental Bioelectricity: the cognitive glue enabling evolutionary scaling from physiology to mind
Developmental bioelectricity—the network of ion channels, gap junctions, and neurotransmitter-mediated Vmem (membrane potential) dynamics operating across all body cells, not just neurons—functions as
- Darwin's agential materials: evolutionary implications of multiscale competency in developmental biology
Cellular collectives operating between the genotype and anatomical phenotype constitute an agential substrate that fundamentally reshapes the evolutionary search process—this is the central claim of L
- Endless forms most beautiful 2.0: teleonomy and the bioengineering of chimaeric and synthetic organisms
Cellular collectives exhibit goal-directed competency that is substrate-independent, composition-independent, and origin-independent — a property Clawson and Levin term teleonomy — and this invariant,
- Stress sharing as cognitive glue for collective intelligences: A computational model of stress as a coordinator for morphogenesis
Stress sharing between cells accelerates collective morphogenesis and expands individual cells' cognitive light cone, as demonstrated in a multiscale agent-based computational model of embryogenesis p
- Cellular signaling pathways as plastic, proto-cognitive systems: Implications for biomedicine
- Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds
TAME—Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere—formalizes a non-binary, empirically grounded framework for recognizing, comparing, and manipulating cognition across radically diverse substrates, from
- Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substrates
Collective intelligence, understood as William James' capacity to reach the same goal by different means, operates not only in beehives and ant colonies but as a scale-free organizing principle across
- Living Things Are Not (20th Century) Machines: Updating Mechanism Metaphors in Light of the Modern Science of Machine Behavior
Bongard and Levin argue that the longstanding debate over whether living things are machines has been conducted against a 20th-century, static definition of 'machine' that modern engineering has alrea
- The computational boundary of a 'self': developmental bioelectricity drives multicellularity and scale-free cognition
Scale-Free Cognition, the framework introduced here, proposes that any coherent Self is demarcated by a 'cognitive light cone'—a spatio-temporal boundary of events a system can measure, model, and att
- Cognitive glues are shared models of relative scarcities: the economics of collective intelligence
Levin and Lyons argue that the price system in market economies is not merely a resource-allocation device but the canonical instantiation of what they term a *cognitive glue* — a coordinating afforda
- Brains and where else? Mapping theories of consciousness to unconventional embodiments
Rouleau and Levin's 2026 analysis in *Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A* (384, issue 2320) demonstrates that the functional and operational principles underlying most contemporary theo
- The collective intelligence of evolution and development
Watson and Levin argue that evolutionary individuality, organismic individuality, and cognition are coextensive — the causal structures necessary to produce fitness that belongs to a collective rather