Size adaptation of Turing prepatterns.

Abstract

Spontaneous pattern formation may arise in biological systems as primary and secondary bifurcations to nonlinear parabolic partial differential equations describing chemical reaction-diffusion systems. Such Turing prepatterns have a specified geometry as long as D/R2 (the diffusion coefficient of the morphogen D divided by the square of a characteristic length) is confined to a (usually) limited interval. As real biochemical systems like cleaving eggs or early embryos vary considerably in size, Turing prepatterns are unable to maintain a specified prepattern-geometry, unless D/R2 is varied as well. We show, that actual biochemical control systems may vary Dapp/R2, where Dapp (kappa) is an apparent diffusion constant, dependent on enzyme regulated rate constants, and that such simple control systems allow Turing structures to adapt to size variations of at least a factor 10(3) (linearly), not only in large connected cell systems, but in single cells as well.