Day S J, Lawrence P A
28 St Oswalds Road, York, YO10 4PF, UK.
Development. 2000 Jul;127(14):2977-87. doi: 10.1242/dev.127.14.2977.
Over many years evidence has accumulated that plants and animals can regulate growth with reference to overall size rather than cell number. Thus, organs and organisms grow until they reach their characteristic size and shape and then they stop - they can even compensate for experimental manipulations that change, over several fold, cell number or average cell size. If the cell size is altered, the organism responds with a change in cell number and vice versa. We look at the Drosophila wing in more detail: here, both extracellular and intracellular regulators have been identified that link cell growth, division and cell survival to final organ size. We discuss a hypothesis that the local steepness of a morphogen gradient is a measure of length in one axis, a measure that is used to determine whether there will be net growth or not.
多年来，已有证据积累表明，植物和动物能够参照整体大小而非细胞数量来调节生长。因此，器官和生物体生长至达到其特有的大小和形状后便停止生长——它们甚至能够补偿那些使细胞数量或平均细胞大小改变数倍的实验操作。如果细胞大小发生改变，生物体则会通过细胞数量的变化做出反应，反之亦然。我们更详细地研究果蝇翅膀：在此，已经鉴定出细胞外和细胞内调节因子，它们将细胞生长、分裂和细胞存活与最终器官大小联系起来。我们讨论一种假说，即形态发生素梯度的局部陡度是一个轴向上长度的度量，该度量用于确定是否会有净生长。
