The Turing Patterns
First published: 2017
Brief summary
Nautilus/overview-style material on Turing patterns and morphogenesis.
Article
The linked Nature paper is not a general overview of Turing patterns. It reports an experimental study of digit formation in mouse limbs and examines whether the developing pattern behaves as predicted by a Turing-type reaction–diffusion mechanism.
Turing’s model shows that interacting substances can destabilise a uniform state when their reaction and diffusion properties differ. The instability can generate regularly spaced concentration peaks that act as a prepattern for later anatomical structures.
The study altered the size and signalling conditions of developing limb tissue and compared the resulting number and spacing of digits with model predictions. The reported changes were consistent with a self-organising wavelength that adjusts to the dimensions and molecular conditions of the tissue.
The findings support a Turing-like mechanism as part of digit patterning, while the biological implementation involves specific signalling pathways and growing tissue. The result concerns this developmental system and does not establish that every repeated biological pattern has the same cause.
Source details and credits
- Source / publisher: Nature
- Source type: Research article
- URL type: WWW
- Credits: Nature
- URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature23995