The temporal coordination of events at cellular and tissue scales is essential for the proper development of organisms, and involves cell-intrinsic processes that can be coupled by local cellular signalling and instructed by global signalling, thereby creating spatial patterns of cellular states that change over time. The timing and structure of these patterns determine how an organism develops. Traditional developmental genetic methods have revealed the complex molecular circuits regulating these processes but are limited in their ability to predict and understand the emergent spatio-temporal dynamics. Increasingly, approaches from physics are now being used to help capture the dynamics of the system by providing simplified, generic descriptions. Combined with advances in imaging and computational power, such approaches aim to provide insight into timing and patterning in developing systems.

细胞和组织尺度事件的时间协调对于生物体的正常发育至关重要，并且涉及细胞内在过程，这些过程可以通过局部细胞信号耦合并通过全局信号指示，从而创建随时间变化的细胞状态空间模式. 这些模式的时间和结构决定了有机体的发育方式。传统的发育遗传方法揭示了调节这些过程的复杂分子回路，但它们预测和理解紧急时空动力学的能力有限。现在越来越多地使用物理学方法通过提供简化的通用描述来帮助捕获系统的动态。结合成像和计算能力的进步，