UC Berkeley

Of fundamental interest to biologists is how organs achieve a reproducible size during development. Studies of the developing Drosophila wing have provided many key insights that will help give a conceptual understanding of the process beyond the fly. In the wing, there is evidence for both "top-down" mechanisms, in which signals emanating from small subsets of cells direct global proliferation, and "bottom-up" mechanisms, in which the final size is an emergent property of local cell-cell interactions. Mechanical forces also appear to have an important role along with the Hippo pathway, which may integrate multiple types of inputs to regulate the extent of growth.