In an article published on September 5 in Biophysical Journal, Associate Professor Kensuke Kawade at the Okazaki Institute for Integrative Bioscience and National Institute for Basic Biology in Japan showed that a transcriptional co-activator ANGUSTIFOLIA3 (AN3) forms a signaling gradient along the leaf proximal-to-distal axis to determine the cell-proliferation domain. In particular, by experimental and theoretical approaches, they demonstrated that pure diffusion in a growing tissue is sufficient to explain the AN3 gradient formation. This work provides evidence that the diffusion-based model of morphogen is viable in developmental patterning of multicellular organisms.