Аннотация
Cell differentiation in multicellular organisms is a complex process
whose mechanism can be understood by a reductionist approach, in which
the individual processes that control the generation of different cell
types are identified. Alternatively, a large-scale approach in search of
different organizational features of the growth stages promises to
reveal its modular global structure with the goal of discovering
previously unknown relations between cell types. Here, we sort and
analyze a large set of scattered data to construct the network of human
cell differentiation (NHCD) based on cell types (nodes) and
differentiation steps (links) from the fertilized egg to a developed
human. We discover a dynamical law of critical branching that reveals a
self-similar regularity in the modular organization of the network, and
allows us to observe the network at different scales. The emerging
picture clearly identifies clusters of cell types following a
hierarchical organization, ranging from sub-modules to super-modules of
specialized tissues and organs on varying scales. This discovery will
allow one to treat the development of a particular cell function in the
context of the complex network of human development as a whole. Our
results point to an integrated large-scale view of the network of cell
types systematically revealing ties between previously unrelated domains
in organ functions.
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