Such_Saturation
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http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v496/n7445/full/nature12037.html
Complex Regulation of cyp26a1 Creates a Robust Retinoic Acid Gradient in the Zebrafish Embryo
Retinoic acid is a signaling molecule that plays an important role in the development of the brain in animal embryos. It forms a gradient along the body of the embryo from the head end to the tail end, but it has proved difficult to measure this gradient directly. The experiments show that retinoic acid forms a gradient in the embryos, with high levels at the tail end and lower levels at the head end. Retinoic acid can directly convey graded positional information over long distances.
More than 100 years ago the idea of a morphogenetic field was proposed by A.G. Gurwitsch, as a way to explain the orderly movements of cells in embryos and growing tissues, and to understand the principles that cause cells to change appropriately when their location in the organism changes. For 30 years, the concept guided research in embryology, but also led to important discoveries in the biology of cancer, aging, wound repair, and other important areas. But by the late 1940s, a more abstract approach to biology, based on the gene doctrine of Mendel and Weismann, took charge of academic and governmental biological research. This ideology at first said that organisms are determined by unchanging units of inheritance, "genes," and later when genes were found to be susceptible to mutation, the changes were said to be always random. The Central Dogma of the ideology was that any meaningful, adaptive changes that occur in an organism can't influence the genes. For many years, adaptive changes were said to be nothing but changes in the size or function of existing cells, because the cells of the major organs of the body were supposed to be created before birth, or in infancy.
Complex Regulation of cyp26a1 Creates a Robust Retinoic Acid Gradient in the Zebrafish Embryo
Retinoic acid is a signaling molecule that plays an important role in the development of the brain in animal embryos. It forms a gradient along the body of the embryo from the head end to the tail end, but it has proved difficult to measure this gradient directly. The experiments show that retinoic acid forms a gradient in the embryos, with high levels at the tail end and lower levels at the head end. Retinoic acid can directly convey graded positional information over long distances.
More than 100 years ago the idea of a morphogenetic field was proposed by A.G. Gurwitsch, as a way to explain the orderly movements of cells in embryos and growing tissues, and to understand the principles that cause cells to change appropriately when their location in the organism changes. For 30 years, the concept guided research in embryology, but also led to important discoveries in the biology of cancer, aging, wound repair, and other important areas. But by the late 1940s, a more abstract approach to biology, based on the gene doctrine of Mendel and Weismann, took charge of academic and governmental biological research. This ideology at first said that organisms are determined by unchanging units of inheritance, "genes," and later when genes were found to be susceptible to mutation, the changes were said to be always random. The Central Dogma of the ideology was that any meaningful, adaptive changes that occur in an organism can't influence the genes. For many years, adaptive changes were said to be nothing but changes in the size or function of existing cells, because the cells of the major organs of the body were supposed to be created before birth, or in infancy.
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