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The size and shape of organs are characteristic for each species. Even when organisms develop to different sizes due to varying environmental conditions, such as nutrition, organ size follows species-specific rules of proportionality to the rest of the body, a phenomenon referred to as allometry. Therefore, for a given environment, organs stop growth at a predictable size set by the species's genotype. How do organs stop growth? How can related species give rise to organs of strikingly different size? No definitive answer has been given to date. One of the major models for the studies of growth termination is the vinegar fly Drosophila melanogaster. Therefore, this review will focus mostly on work carried out in Drosophila to try to tease apart potential mechanisms and identify routes for further investigation. One general rule, found across the animal kingdom, is that the rate of growth declines with developmental time. Therefore, answers to the problem of growth termination should explain this seemingly universal fact. In addition, growth termination is intimately related to the problems of robustness (i.e. precision) and plasticity in organ size, symmetric and asymmetric organ development, and of how the 'target' size depends on extrinsic, environmental factors.

The size and shape of organs is species specific, and even in species in which organ size is strongly influenced by environmental cues, such as nutrition or temperature, it follows defined rules. Therefore, mechanisms must exist to ensure a tight control of organ size within a given species, while being flexible enough to allow for the evolution of different organ sizes in different species.We combined computational modeling and quantitative measurements to analyze growth control in the Drosophila eye disc. We find that the area growth rate declines inversely proportional to the increasing total eye disc area.We identify two growth laws that are consistent with the growth data and that would explain the extraordinary robustness and evolutionary plasticity of the growth process and thus of the final adult eye size. These two growth laws correspond to very different control mechanisms and we discuss how each of these laws constrains the set of candidate biological mechanisms for growth control in the Drosophila eye disc.