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Developmental biology

Order in the lung

Nature volume 453, pages 733–734 (2008)Cite this article

Given the lung's thousands of branching airways, its development might be expected to be a highly complex process. Yet a surprisingly simple picture now emerges of when, where and in what order these branches form.

Elaborate branching is everywhere in nature. From riverbeds to oilfields, from trees to blood vessels, branching connects the large to the small. The lung is also a prime example of a reproducible branching system, allowing gas to be transported from the air to tissues deep within an animal. Without it — or without the simpler branched ducts found in less complex organisms — oxygen transport by diffusion probably would have limited the evolution of terrestrial animals to less than one millimetre in size. But how does such a sophisticated network develop? Metzger et al.1 (page 745 of this issue) provide a remarkable, yet simple picture that explains the orderly development of the more than a million branches in the mammalian lung.

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Figure 1: A master and three slaves.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. David Warburton is at the Saban Research Institute, Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, University of Southern California, 4650 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 90027, USA. dwarburton@chla.usc.edu ,

    David Warburton

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  1. David Warburton
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Warburton, D. Order in the lung. Nature 453, 733–734 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/453733a

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