Synthetic morphology: modular morphogenetic events

The phrase appears in Leduc's 1911 book The Mechanism of Life. Leduc reports a memoir of 1871 by the Dutch scholar Harting on the artificial production of some organic calcareous formations. Citing Professor R. Dubois, he says the memoir had cost Harting more than thirty years of work.¹ Dubois called synthetic morphology a field still in its infancy. He hoped that, given as much time as had passed since the first artificial production of urea, it would progress as far as its older sister, synthetic chemistry.¹ In this early sense the term meant making organic forms artificially, not engineering cells.

Davies and Cachat (2016) trace the modern programme to an early speculative paper on synthetic morphogenesis. That paper suggested that most mammalian morphogenesis combines about ten basic events: proliferation, cell death, fusion, adhesion, de-adhesion, migration, two transitions between epithelium and mesenchyme, epithelial folding and lumen formation.² They add that earlier studies had found genes, some of viral origin, whose activation drives one specific event. This allowed their group to build modules for proliferation, elective cell death, cell fusion, cell adhesion and locomotion.³

Davies and Cachat state that the modules were published separately from work on patterning. In principle they can be placed downstream of it.³ A simple proof-of-principle example has been made. It used patterning by phase separation, then triggered a cell death module in one colour of cells. This turned a pattern of colours into a net-like arrangement of cells and spaces.³ Davies and Glykofrydis (2020) say the modules were first shown only in very simple verification assays. They describe the same sieve-like result and report that work is underway to couple patterning to responses more sophisticated than elimination.⁴

Cell fusion is also studied outside the module programme. Kippenberger and colleagues (2023) note that Physarum can transfer a learned behaviour to other individuals by cell fusion. They take this to indicate a material correlate of learning, for which they say there is no convincing theory.⁷ Reid (2023) disputes Vogel and Dussutour's (2016) description of unhabituated plasmodia acquiring a learned behaviour from habituated ones. Reid argues that after fusion, the regions should not be called individual plasmodia.⁶ Iorio and colleagues (2024) report that fusing human mesenchymal stem cells with cardiomyocytes moves mitochondria into the cardiomyocytes and reprograms the hybrids toward a progenitor-like state.⁸ Abramson and Levin (2021) offer behaviorist methods to the field of functional synthetic morphology.⁵ Pai and colleagues (2025) treat synthetic morphology as a source of model systems free of a history of environmental selection.⁹