Adaptive self-organization in tissue development: natural and synthetic

The large scale features of animal development (1 head, 4 limbs...) are fixed and predictable, but small-scale features (capillary patterns, layout of alveoli etc) are far less fixed, and are predictable only in a statistical sense. One possible explanation is that small scale features are not specified directly by a 'genetic program' but are instead self-organizing. According to this view, genes make molecular machines that interact with their immediate environments and organize micro-patterns in an appropriate way. In principle, this adaptive self-organization has a number of very useful features including scaleability and error mitigation. In this talk, I will examine the evidence for mechanisms of adaptive self-organization during mammalian organ development, and will describe our current attempts to create synthetic biological mechanisms that work in this way.