{"id":11351,"date":"2023-11-09T01:50:38","date_gmt":"2023-11-09T01:50:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/2023\/11\/09\/a-new-study-updates-turings-theory-on-how-animals-get-their-spots-and-stripes\/"},"modified":"2023-11-09T01:50:38","modified_gmt":"2023-11-09T01:50:38","slug":"a-new-study-updates-turings-theory-on-how-animals-get-their-spots-and-stripes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/2023\/11\/09\/a-new-study-updates-turings-theory-on-how-animals-get-their-spots-and-stripes\/","title":{"rendered":"A new study updates Turing\u2019s theory on how animals get their spots and stripes"},"content":{"rendered":"

The strikingly patterned ornate boxfish has no lack of detail when it comes to its hexagonal spots and keen stripes \u2014 the intricate markings are so sharp-edged in the species that it had engineers at the University of Colorado Boulder puzzling\u00a0<\/strong>over how it came to have this distinctive appearance. <\/p>\n

Alan Turing, a renowned mathematician who\u00a0invented modern computing, proposed more than 70 years ago that animals got their patterns through the production of chemical agents that would diffuse through skin tissue, similar to the way creamer would in coffee. The chemicals would interact while other agents would inhibit their activity, resulting in pattern formation. But Turing\u2019s theory didn\u2019t explain how the patterns would remain so defined in a species such as the ornate boxfish. <\/p>\n

The team of engineers at the University of Colorado Boulder explored how\u00a0a mechanism called diffusiophoresis might create sharp patterns in a new study published\u00a0Wednesday in the journal of Science Advances. Diffusiophoresis describes the movement of molecules\u00a0suspended in a fluid in response to a\u00a0concentration gradient\u00a0of a separate chemical, causing the small particles, in this case chromatophores (pigment cells), to concentrate and clump together. <\/p>\n

When the scientists computed Turing\u2019s equation, modified to include this process, the simulations they generated showed the molecules\u2019 path had always created sharp outlines, unlike the fuzzy, ill-defined spots that Turing\u2019s theory alone would create. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we were kind of curious about really was that if it is diffusion, then the patterns should not be sharp \u2026 the colors should not be so striking,\u201d said study coauthor\u00a0<\/strong>Ankur Gupta, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. \u201cSo, what gives that striking sharpness to these patterns? That\u2019s where diffusiophoresis comes in.\u201d <\/p>\n

The engineers\u2019 findings suggest that with the diffusion of chemical agents, chromatophores\u00a0<\/strong>are also dragged along their trajectory in diffusiophoresis, creating spots and stripes with a much sharper outline,\u00a0according to a news release\u00a0on the study. <\/p>\n

Gupta said he hopes the findings will promote further research on diffusiophoresis regarding embryo and tumor formation as well as camouflage and other species\u2019 biological processes. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea of sharpening interfaces is a good one, and definitely important for biological function,\u201d said\u00a0Dr. Andrew Krause, an assistant professor of applied mathematics at Durham University in the United Kingdom who has\u00a0studied Turing\u2019s theory, in an email. <\/p>\n

\u201cMathematical ideas like diffusion do often lead to \u2018smooth\u2019 or continuous interfaces, whereas most boundaries in biological tissues (e.g., like the boundaries between your organs) are relatively rigid. \u2026 It is at least one possible way to sharpen regions of gene expression,\u201d said Krause, who was not involved in the study. <\/p>\n

Other possibilities to refine Turing\u2019s theory<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Turing\u2019s hypothesis first appeared in 1952 in a paper he wrote titled \u201cThe Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis.\u201d His theory argued that animal patterns were not random, but rather a chemical reaction-diffusion process that systematically creates the spots on a leopard or stripes on a tiger, according to the\u00a0University of Warwick. <\/p>\n

While diffusiophoresis is a suggested modification to sharpen Turing\u2019s theory based on the recent study, there could be other possible solutions, said\u00a0Jeremy Green, a professor of developmental biology at King\u2019s College London. <\/p>\n

\u201cCells are extremely sticky and are very unlikely to be moved by diffusiophoresis,\u201d said Green, who was not involved in the study, in an email. \u201cCells moving to sharpen a Turing pattern (or indeed any boundary) is not a new idea, and can happen not only by chemotaxis (active cell migration) but also by other mechanisms.\u201d <\/p>\n

Green said he believes the study is likely to influence modeling and experimentation in the future, but there are still gaps in Turing\u2019s theory yet to be explored. Green coauthored a\u00a0February 2012 study\u00a0that had found evidence to support Turing\u2019s theory when it came to the ridges on a mouse\u2019s palate. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe did consider other possibilities in our paper and acknowledged that processes like chemotaxis, i.e., cell migration, are present,\u201d Gupta said in an email. \u201cWe do not intend to claim that diffusiophoresis is the only mechanism, but rather it is present and has been underappreciated. Including diffusiophoresis helps improve the robustness of such predictions.\u201d <\/p>\n\n

This post appeared first on cnn.com<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The strikingly patterned ornate boxfish has no lack of detail when it comes to its hexagonal spots and keen stripes \u2014 the intricate markings are so sharp-edged in the species that it had engineers at the University of Colorado Boulder puzzling\u00a0over how it came to have this distinctive appearance. Alan Turing, a renowned mathematician who\u00a0invented <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":11352,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-11351","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11351\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}