Cell biology of the chick organizer: Origins, composition, population dynamics and fate

Abstract

The year 2024 celebrates 100 years of perhaps one of the most important and influential papers in the field of developmental biology: Spemann and Mangold's publication reporting the discovery of the “organizer”, which can induce and pattern the nervous system and also pattern the axial-lateral axis of the mesoderm. While many papers have investigated, and many others reviewed, the signalling aspects of the organizer, relatively fewer have concentrated on the cell biology of organizer cells. Here we survey more than 12 decades of knowledge on the chick organizer, including the cellular origins, fates, composition, cell movements, cell population properties and molecular dynamics of the chick organizer (the tip of the primitive streak). What emerges is a picture of an extremely complex and dynamic population of cells whose properties change over space and time, quite different from the “textbook” view of a static group of cells set aside during early development to perform a particular function in the normal embryo before being swept aside. Some of these findings also have more general implications for the interpretation of results from single cell RNA sequencing experiments.