ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2015
Forging patterns and making waves from biology to geology: a commentary on Turing (1952) 'The chemical basis of morphogenesis'.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 580 papers.
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580 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- An alternate mechanism for the emergence of localized oscillatory patterns in networked reaction-diffusion systems.National science review · 2026Article
- Article
- Fundamental limits on symmetry breaking by Turing-like activator-inhibitor mechanisms.Development (Cambridge, England) · 2026Article
- Mitotic Cdc42 waves encode PI(3,4)PScience advances · 2026Article
- Roles of K-channel activity in feather bud morphogenesis.Developmental biology · 2026Article
- A modeller's guide for biomedical discovery.Disease models & mechanisms · 2026Article
- A novel reaction-diffusion architecture for engineering self-organized patterns in mammalian cells.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Turing-driven spiral defect chaos with stationary spiral tips: universal criticality in a time-discrete oscillatory system.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Modeling of gene regulatory networks: an annotated glossary.Trends in plant science · 2026Review
- Are physiological oscillations physiological?The Journal of physiology · 2026Review
- Numerical bifurcation analysis of turing and symmetry broken patterns of a PDE model for vegetation dynamics.Journal of mathematical biology · 2026Article
- Revisiting Turing's Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2026Review
- Using Floquet theory to unravel far-from equilibrium dynamics in reaction-diffusion systems.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Pattern Formation in Agent-Based and PDE Models for Evolutionary Games with Payoff-Driven Motion.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2026Article
- Mathematical analysis of G1/S sub-networks in hematopoietic proliferation: Sequential and lineage-specific activation.iScience · 2026Article
- The Emergence of Turing Instability and Pattern Formation in a Nonlinear Stochastic Spatiotemporal Epidemic Model with Reinfections.Acta biotheoretica · 2026Article
- Simulation of reaction-diffusion equations with reaction-reaction analog circuits.Biophysical journal · 2026Article
- Trade-offs in insect eye nanocoatings: implications for vision, ecology, and climate sensitivity.EMBO reports · 2026Article
- Embryonic scaling: morphogen gradients, size sensing, and scaler genes.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2026Review
520 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Abstract
Alan Turing was neither a biologist nor a chemist, and yet the paper he published in 1952, 'The chemical basis of morphogenesis', on the spontaneous formation of patterns in systems undergoing reaction and diffusion of their ingredients has had a substantial impact on both fields, as well as in other areas as disparate as geomorphology and criminology. Motivated by the question of how a spherical embryo becomes a decidedly non-spherical organism such as a human being, Turing devised a mathematical model that explained how random fluctuations can drive the emergence of pattern and structure from initial uniformity. The spontaneous appearance of pattern and form in a system far away from its equilibrium state occurs in many types of natural process, and in some artificial ones too. It is often driven by very general mechanisms, of which Turing's model supplies one of the most versatile. For that reason, these patterns show striking similarities in systems that seem superficially to share nothing in common, such as the stripes of sand ripples and of pigmentation on a zebra skin. New examples of 'Turing patterns' in biology and beyond are still being discovered today. This commentary was written to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
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