Critical behavior and axis defining symmetry breaking in Hydra embryonic development

The formation of a hollow cellular sphere is often one of the first steps of multicellular embryonic development. In the case of hydra, the sphere breaks its initial symmetry to form a foot–head axis. During this process a gene, ks1, is increasingly expressed in localized cell domains whose size distribution becomes scale-free at the axis-locking moment. We show that a physical model based solely on the production and exchange of ks1-promoting factors among neighboring cells robustly reproduces the scaling behavior as well as the experimentally observed spontaneous and temperature-directed symmetry breaking.