Metazoan animals are characterized by restricted phenotypic heterogeneity (i.e. morphological disparity) of organisms within various species, a feature that contrasts sharply with intra-species morphological diversity observed in the plant kingdom. Robust emergence of morphogenic blueprint in metazoan animals reflects restricted autonomy of individual cells in adoption of fate outcomes such as differentiation. Fates of individual cells are linked to and influenced by fates of neighboring cells at the population level. Such coupling is a common property of all self-organising systems and propels emergence of order from simple interactions between individual cells without supervision by external directing forces. As a consequence of coupling, expected functional relationship between the constituent cells of an organ system is robustly established concurrent with multiple rounds of cell division during morphogenesis. Notably, the molecular regulation of multicellular coupling during morphogenic self-organisation remains largely unexplored. Here, we review the existing literature on multicellular self-organisation with particular emphasis on recent discovery that β-catenin is the key coupling factor that programs emergence of multi-cellular self-organisation by regulating synchronised cycling of individual cells.

中文翻译：

---

耦合的循环和后生动物形态发生的调控。

后生动物的特征是各种物种内生物体的表型异质性受到限制（即形态差异），这一特征与在植物界中观察到的种内形态多样性形成鲜明对比。后生动物中形态发生蓝图的强劲出现反映了采用命运结果（例如分化）时单个细胞的自主权受到限制。单个细胞的命运在种群水平上与相邻细胞的命运相关并受其影响。这种耦合是所有自组织系统的共同属性，并推动了单个单元之间简单交互的出现，而无需外部指挥力的监督。由于耦合，牢固地建立了器官系统组成细胞之间的预期功能关系，并在形态发生过程中进行了多轮细胞分裂。值得注意的是，在形态发生自组织过程中多细胞偶联的分子调控仍未开发。在这里，我们回顾了有关多细胞自组织的现有文献，尤其着重于最近的发现，即β-连环蛋白是通过调节单个细胞的同步循环来编程多细胞自组织的出现的关键偶联因子。