Journal article
A Comprehensive Network Atlas Reveals That Turing Patterns Are Common but Not Robust
NS Scholes, D Schnoerr, M Isalan, MPH Stumpf
Cell Systems | CELL PRESS | Published : 2019
Abstract
Turing patterns (TPs) underlie many fundamental developmental processes, but they operate over narrow parameter ranges, raising the conundrum of how evolution can ever discover them. Here we explore TP design space to address this question and to distill design rules. We exhaustively analyze 2- and 3-node biological candidate Turing systems, amounting to 7,625 networks and more than 3 × 1011 analyzed scenarios. We find that network structure alone neither implies nor guarantees emergent TPs. A large fraction (>61%) of network design space can produce TPs, but these are sensitive to even subtle changes in parameters, network structure, and regulatory mechanisms. This implies that TP networks ..
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Funding Acknowledgements
This work was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. N.S.S. was partially supported by a BBSRC DTP Ph.D. studentship and by a Boehringer-Ingelheim-Fonds Ph.D. Fellowship. We like to thank the members of the Theoretical Systems Biology Group in London and Melbourne for helpful discussions. The manuscript has benefited from the comments of three anonymous referees, and we are grateful to Neil Dalchau for pointing out additional symmetry considerations in counting candidate Turing pattern generating motifs.