About: Differential adhesion hypothesis

Differential adhesion hypothesis (DAH) is a hypothesis that explains cellular movement during morphogenesis with thermodynamic principles. In DAH tissues are treated as liquids consisting of mobile cells whose varying degrees of surface adhesion cause them to reorganize spontaneously to minimize their interfacial free energy. Put another way, according to DAH, cells move to be near other cells of similar adhesive strength in order to maximize the bonding strength between cells and produce a more thermodynamically stable structure. In this way the movement of cells during tissue formation, according to DAH, parodies the behavior of a mixture of liquids. Although originally motivated by the problem of understanding cell sorting behavior in vertebrate embryos, DAH has subsequently been applie