ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Stochastic Turing patterns in a synthetic bacterial population.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 69 papers.
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69 citing papers in PubMed.
- Engineered E. coli swarming for binary and analog input recording.Molecular systems biology · 2026Article
- Stochastic theory for pattern formation and front propagation in transitional pipe turbulence.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Solution landscape of reaction-diffusion systems reveals a nonlinear mechanism and spatial robustness of pattern formation.Fundamental research · 2026Article
- A novel reaction-diffusion architecture for engineering self-organized patterns in mammalian cells.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Geometric ordering in bacterial communities.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Turing-driven spiral defect chaos with stationary spiral tips: universal criticality in a time-discrete oscillatory system.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Dynamics of the formation of flat clathrin lattices in response to growth factor stimulus.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Interplay of Spatial Structure and Interactions in Microbial Communities.Environmental microbiology · 2026Review
- Pattern Formation in Agent-Based and PDE Models for Evolutionary Games with Payoff-Driven Motion.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2026Article
- Engineering development: From the repressilator and toggle switch to synthetic developmental biology.Developmental biology · 2025Review
- Designing reaction-cross-diffusion systems with Turing and wave instabilities.Journal of mathematical biology · 2025Article
- Dynamical systems of fate and form in development.Seminars in cell & developmental biology · 2025Review
- Efficient approximations of transcriptional bursting effects on the dynamics of a gene regulatory network.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Dynamics of the formation of flat clathrin lattices in response to growth factor stimulus.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Partitioning of a 2-bit hash function across 66 communicating cells.Nature chemical biology · 2025Article
- Optimal network sizes for most robust Turing patterns.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Spatiotemporal orchestration of calcium-cAMP oscillations on AKAP/AC nanodomains is governed by an incoherent feedforward loop.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Resonant noise amplification in a predator-prey model with quasi-discrete generations.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- A Systematic Hierarchical Virtual Screening Model for RhlR Inhibitors Based on PCA, Pharmacophore, Docking, and Molecular Dynamics.International journal of molecular sciences · 2024Article
- Engineering Tunable, Low Latency Spatial Computation with Dual Input Quorum Sensing Promoters.ACS synthetic biology · 2024Article
9 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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6 authors.
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Abstract
The origin of biological morphology and form is one of the deepest problems in science, underlying our understanding of development and the functioning of living systems. In 1952, Alan Turing showed that chemical morphogenesis could arise from a linear instability of a spatially uniform state, giving rise to periodic pattern formation in reaction-diffusion systems but only those with a rapidly diffusing inhibitor and a slowly diffusing activator. These conditions are disappointingly hard to achieve in nature, and the role of Turing instabilities in biological pattern formation has been called into question. Recently, the theory was extended to include noisy activator-inhibitor birth and death processes. Surprisingly, this stochastic Turing theory predicts the existence of patterns over a wide range of parameters, in particular with no severe requirement on the ratio of activator-inhibitor diffusion coefficients. To explore whether this mechanism is viable in practice, we have genetically engineered a synthetic bacterial population in which the signaling molecules form a stochastic activator-inhibitor system. The synthetic pattern-forming gene circuit destabilizes an initially homogenous lawn of genetically engineered bacteria, producing disordered patterns with tunable features on a spatial scale much larger than that of a single cell. Spatial correlations of the experimental patterns agree quantitatively with the signature predicted by theory. These results show that Turing-type pattern-forming mechanisms, if driven by stochasticity, can potentially underlie a broad range of biological patterns. These findings provide the groundwork for a unified picture of biological morphogenesis, arising from a combination of stochastic gene expression and dynamical instabilities.
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