6 June 2025
Francis Corson
Laboratory of Physics
Ecole Normale Supérieure, FRANCE
Embryos are remarkably adept at developing towards a functional form in spite of perturbations. Take an early avian embryo and cut it in half, and you will get two fully-formed embryos. Drawing from examples like this one, which we have found to involve mechanical feedback, I will discuss some of the ways that cell-cell interactions can support self-organization, and ask whether we should think of the form of an embryo as a consensus among its parts.