Related papers: The reaction-diffusion approach to morphogenesis
A central question in developmental biology is how size and position are determined. The genetic code carries instructions on how to control these properties in order to regulate the pattern and morphology of structures in the developing…
Reaction-diffusion systems have been proposed as a model for pattern formation and morphogenesis. The Fickian diffusion typically employed in these constructions model the Brownian motion of particles. The biological and chemical elements…
Intracellular protein patterns govern essential cellular functions by dynamically redistributing proteins between membrane-bound and cytosolic states, conserving their total numbers. This review presents a theoretical framework for…
Alan Turing's work in Morphogenesis has received wide attention during the past 60 years. The central idea behind his theory is that two chemically interacting diffusible substances are able to generate stable spatial patterns, provided…
The formation of self-organized patterns is key to the morphogenesis of multicellular organisms, although a comprehensive theory of biological pattern formation is still lacking. Here, we propose a minimal model combining tissue mechanics…
A large variety of real systems are composed by entities in relationships which can be represented by networks. In many of these systems, elements are embedded in the space and location information impacts properties and evolution. Local…
Making sense of complex inhomogeneous systems composed of many interacting species is a grand challenge that pervades basically all natural sciences. Phase separation and pattern formation in reaction-diffusion systems have been largely…
Morphogenetic patterns are highly sophisticated dissipative structures. Are they governed by the same general mechanisms as chemical and hydrodynamic patterns? Turing's symmetry breaking and Wolpert's signalling provide alternative…
Eyespots are concentric motifs with contrasting colours on butterfly wings. Eyespots have intra- and inter-specific visual signalling functions with adaptive and selective roles. We propose a reaction-diffusion model that accounts for…
Robustness of spatial pattern against perturbations is an indispensable property of developmental processes for organisms, which need to adapt to changing environments. Although specific mechanisms for this robustness have been extensively…
Among the main actors of organism development there are morphogens, which are signaling molecules diffusing in the developing organism and acting on cells to produce local responses. Growth is thus determined by the distribution of such…
The reaction-diffusion models have been extensively applied to explain the mechanism of pattern formations in early embryogenesis based on geometrically confined microtissues consisting of human pluripotent stem cells. Recently, mechanical…
Understanding anomalous transport and reaction kinetics due to microscopic physical and chemical disorder is a long-standing goal in many fields including geophysics, biology, and engineering. We consider reaction-diffusion characterized by…
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 process of polarization determines the head and tail of single cells. A mechanism of this kind frequently precedes the subsequent cell locomotion and it determines the direction of motion. The process of polarization has frequently been…
The process of morphogenesis, which can be defined as an evolution of the form of an organism, is one of the most intriguing mysteries in the life sciences. It is clear, that gene expression patterns cannot explain the development of the…
Modeling the spontaneous evolution of morphology in natural systems and its preservation by proportionate growth remains a major scientific challenge. Yet, it is conceivable that if the basic mechanisms of growth and the coupled kinetic…
Reaction-diffusion models have been used over decades to study biological systems. In this context, evolution equations for probability distribution functions and the associated stochastic differential equations have nowadays become…
We consider a reaction-diffusion system with discontinuous reaction terms modeled by non-ideal relays. The system is motivated by an epigenetic population model of evolution of two-phenotype bacteria which switch phenotype in response to…
Morphogenesis is central to biology but remains largely unexplored in chemistry. Reaction-diffusion (RD) mechanisms are, however, essential to understand how shape emerges in the living world. While numerical methods confirm the incredible…