Lawrence's main discoveries lie in trying to understand the information that shapes an animal or generates a pattern (such as on a butterfly wing or a fingerprint). He is a principal advocate of the theory that cells in a gradient of a morphogen each develop according to the local concentration of that morphogen and that this mechanism thereby patterns fields of cells. Together with Ginés Morata, he has helped establish the compartment theory. Under this hypothesis a set of cells collectively builds a precisely defined territory (or compartment) in the animal. As development proceeds, a selector gene switches on in a subset of these cells thus dividing the set into two, all the progeny of each set construct one of the two adjacent compartments.[5] Much of the evidence for the hypothesis comes from studies on the abdomen of Oncopeltus[6][7] and the Drosophila fly wing.[8]
Since the mid 1990s he has collaborated with José Casal, Gary Struhl, and others to study Planar Cell Polarity (PCP) and cell affinity. PCP is a common property of cells which can show coordinated polarity in the plane of the epithelia. PCP is often revealed by the consistent orientation of visible structures such as cuticular bristles in insects or hairs in mammals. Using the powerful genetics of Drosophila, particularly the ability to make genetic mosaics, Lawrence and his colleagues provided evidence that there are two separate molecular/genetic systems that build PCP. At the heart of each system is a gradient of a molecule that extends across the tissue. The local slopes of these gradients are detected by means of molecules that form intercellular bridges and are used to orient PCP in each cell.[9][10] Casal, Lawrence and their group have now demonstrated and measured the two molecular gradients in vivo.[11][12] His research was funded by the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust and the Leverhulme Trust.
Lawrence wrote the book The Making of a Fly in 1992,[2] which explains how the body plans of flies are constructed. Findings on the fly have strong implications for other animals such as mammals. The book received further “recognition” in April 2011 when fellow biologist Michael Eisen discovered two booksellers were programmatically setting increasingly higher prices for copies of the book on amazon.com used book market. Margrethe Vestager (European Commissioner for Competition) mentioned this event as an early example of algorithmic tacit collusion on March 16, 2017.[14][15] The sellers eventually priced copies over 23millionUSD before the feedback loop was broken.[16][17][18][19]
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
