ArticleNature2017
A living mesoscopic cellular automaton made of skin scales.
Article in Nature, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers.
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Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed.
- Color patterns as a model for connecting developmental mechanisms to phenotypic evolution.Nature communications · 2026Review
- Chemotactic self-organization captures the dynamics of mammalian hair follicle patterning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
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- Chemical and mechanical patterning of tortoise skin scales occur in different regions of the head.iScience · 2025Article
- The dynamic behavior of chromatophores marks the transition from bands to spots in leopard geckos.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Investigating chiral morphogenesis of gold using generative cellular automata.Nature materials · 2024Article
- Review
- Learning spatio-temporal patterns with Neural Cellular Automata.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Forceful patterning: theoretical principles of mechanochemical pattern formation.EMBO reports · 2023Review
- Phase intensity nanoscope (PINE) opens long-time investigation windows of living matter.Nature communications · 2023Article
- LPF: a framework for exploring the wing color pattern formation of ladybird beetles in Python.Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) · 2023Article
- Disappearance, division, and route change of excitable reaction-diffusion waves in deformable membranes.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Modeling convergent scale-by-scale skin color patterning in multiple species of lizards.Current biology : CB · 2022Article
- Sex Determination in Immature Sierra Nevada Lizard (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Stability selection enables robust learning of differential equations from limited noisy data.Proceedings. Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2022Article
- A single locus regulates a female-limited color pattern polymorphism in a reptile.Science advances · 2022Article
- Article
- Using Delaunay triangulation to sample whole-specimen color from digital images.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- From embryos to embryoids: How external signals and self-organization drive embryonic development.Stem cell reports · 2021Review
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In vertebrates, skin colour patterns emerge from nonlinear dynamical microscopic systems of cell interactions. Here we show that in ocellated lizards a quasi-hexagonal lattice of skin scales, rather than individual chromatophore cells, establishes a green and black labyrinthine pattern of skin colour. We analysed time series of lizard scale colour dynamics over four years of their development and demonstrate that this pattern is produced by a cellular automaton (a grid of elements whose states are iterated according to a set of rules based on the states of neighbouring elements) that dynamically computes the colour states of individual mesoscopic skin scales to produce the corresponding macroscopic colour pattern. Using numerical simulations and mathematical derivation, we identify how a discrete von Neumann cellular automaton emerges from a continuous Turing reaction-diffusion system. Skin thickness variation generated by three-dimensional morphogenesis of skin scales causes the underlying reaction-diffusion dynamics to separate into microscopic and mesoscopic spatial scales, the latter generating a cellular automaton. Our study indicates that cellular automata are not merely abstract computational systems, but can directly correspond to processes generated by biological evolution.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.