Universal behaviour of clones in developing tissues

The formation of complex tissues and organs during embryonic development relies on the tightly regulated interplay between many cells. The behaviour of these cells is reflected in the time evolution of their progeny, termed clones, which serve as a key experimental observable. We showed that the time evolution of the progeny of such cells, termed clones, follows universal behaviour which is independent of the biological context. The identification of such universal behaviour allows specific information about the behaviour of stem cells information to be distilled from experiments.