Related papers: The biological frontier of pattern formation
Turing instability in activator-inhibitor systems provides a paradigm of nonequilibrium pattern formation; it has been extensively investigated for biological and chemical processes. Turing pattern formation should furthermore be possible…
Topology transcends boundaries that conventionally delineate physical, biological and engineering sciences. Our ability to mathematically describe topology, combined with our access to precision tracking and manipulation approaches, has…
The generation of anisotropic shapes occurs during morphogenesis of almost all organisms. With the recent renewal of the interest in mechanical aspects of morphogenesis, it has become clear that mechanics contributes to anisotropic forms in…
The multifarious internal workings of organisms are difficult to reconcile with a single feature defining a state of being alive. Indeed, definitions of life rely on emergent properties (growth, capacity to evolve, agency) only symptomatic…
A phase-separation front will leave in its wake a phase-separated morphology that differs markedly from homogeneous phase-separation morphologies. For a purely diffusive system such a front, moving with constant velocity, will generate very…
Pinning and depinning of wavefronts are ubiquitous features of spatially discrete systems describing a host of phenomena in physics, biology, etc. A large class of discrete systems is described by overdamped chains of nonlinear oscillators…
Growing experimental evidence indicates that topological defects could serve as organizing centers in the morphogenesis of tissues. Here, we provide a quantitative explanation for this phenomenon, rooted in the buckling theory of deformable…
Phyllotactic patterns, i.e. regular arrangements of leaves or seeds around a plant stem, are fascinating examples of complex structures encountered in Nature. In botany, their symmetries develop when a new primordium periodically grows in…
Models of diffusion driven pattern formation that rely on the Turing mechanism are utilized in many areas of science. However, many such models suffer from the defect of requiring fine tuning of parameters or an unrealistic separation of…
A number of mechanisms that lead to the confinement of patterns to a small part of a translationally symmetric pattern-forming system are reviewed: nonadiabatic locking of fronts, global coupling and conservation laws, dispersion, and…
Both natural and engineered supply networks exhibit universal structural patterns, such as the formation of loops, yet the principles governing optimal structures remain unclear. These patterns can be interpreted as solutions of…
The theory of patterns formation for a reaction-diffusion system defined on a multiplex is developed by means of a perturbative approach. The intra-layer diffusion constants act as small parameter in the expansion and the unperturbed state…
The rheological properties of biological tissues are core to processes such as cancer metastasis, wound healing and embryo development. The emergence of tissue and organ structures during morphogenesis requires the precise formation of…
The emergence of life from inanimate matter presents a thermodynamic challenge: the Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates a global trend towards disorder, yet life constitutes localized pockets of profound organization. This paper presents…
Structured waves are ubiquitous for all areas of wave physics, both classical and quantum, where the wavefields are inhomogeneous and cannot be approximated by a single plane wave. Even the interference of two plane waves, or a single…
We develop a formalism to discuss the properties of GENERIC systems in terms of corresponding Hamiltonians that appear in the characterization of large-deviation limits. We demonstrate how the GENERIC structure naturally arises from a…
Recent 3D organ reconstitution studies show that a group of stem cells can establish a body axis and acquire different fates in a spatially organized manner. How such symmetry breaking happens in the absence of external spatial cues, and…
The cells and tissues that make up our body juggle contradictory mechanical demands. It is crucial for their survival to be able to withstand large mechanical loads, but it is equally crucial for them to produce forces and actively change…
One of the major challenges in biology concerns the integration of data across length and time scales into a consistent framework: how do macroscopic properties and functionalities arise from the molecular regulatory networks - and how can…
We model the competition between recombination and point mutation in microbial genomes, and present evidence for two distinct phases, one uniform, the other genetically diverse. Depending on the specifics of homologous recombination, we…