Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
In a process termed lateral inhibition, nascent neurons via expression of Notch ligands are thought to suppress neuronal development of adjacent cells. It has recently been shown, however, that expression of the Notch ligands, as well as the proneural transcription factors that induce them, and the Notch effector Hes1 oscillate with a period of a few hours. This dynamic expression pattern is incompatible with the notion of lateral inhibition and demands a new understanding of how all-over oscillatory expression patterns are converted to localized and persistent signaling.
This perspective article proposes a general law (Bouma law), which states that a visual object is crowded (and therefore cannot be perceived) when spacing between multiple objects is less than a critical spacing value. Crucially, this value is independent of the object.
