Review
Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology 6, 919-928 (December 2005) | doi:10.1038/nrm1782
Article series: Developmental Cell Biology
Cleavage pattern and emerging asymmetry of the mouse embryo
Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz1 About the author
Abstract
Early mammalian development is regulative — it is flexible and responsive to experimental intervention. This flexibility could be explained if embryogenesis were originally completely unbiased and disordered; order and determination of cells only arising later. Alternatively, regulative behaviour could be consistent with the embryo having some order or bias from the very beginning, with inflexibility and cell determination increasing steadily over time. Recent evidence supports the second view and indicates that the sequence and the orientations of cell divisions help to build the first asymmetries.
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Author affiliations
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The Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge, Tennis Court Road, Cambridge, CB2 1QR, UK.
Email: mzg@mole.bio.cam.ac.uk
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