- What did Turing's papers on morphogenesis propose about how a developing embryo generates pattern, and how has biology since confirmed it?
Morphogenesis
How biological form and pattern arise during development.
- What is the role of positive feedback between auxin flux and transport capacity in stabilizing vein channels during leaf venation?
- How does modeling cells as graph nodes and intercellular membranes as unoriented edges allow branching vein patterns to emerge from a single auxin source-sink pair?
- What mathematical mechanism produces the 'reverse-fountain' auxin flow pattern observed at plant root tips?
- How can competing growth regions in a plant tissue draw water away from each other through shared water potential gradients?
- What role do mechanical and physical fields play alongside chemical (hormonal) gradients in regulating plant morphogenesis?
- What role do coupled partial differential equations play in capturing the bidirectional relationship between morphogen gradients and tissue architecture?
- In what sense does tissue geometry tune morphogen gradient profiles during development, and what does this imply for treating morphogens as physical rather than purely chemical fields?
- Why can ordered, tissue-wide auxin transport patterns emerge without a pre-existing auxin concentration gradient?
- How can a reaction-diffusion model, building on Turing's 1952 framework, explain the spontaneous emergence of spatial pattern from an initially homogeneous meristem?
- What mechanism allows the shoot apical meristem to maintain a stable size over time despite developmental perturbations?
- What kinds of root architecture changes, such as branching patterns, root angles, and growth rates, can be predictably engineered using synthetic genetic circuits?
- How does spatial and temporal control of synthetic circuits allow targeted manipulation of the developmental gradients that govern plant growth?
- How does introducing stochastic fluctuations into the reaction-diffusion framework affect the robustness of vascular pattern formation compared to deterministic Turing models?
- Why does vascular bundle formation fail below a threshold width of parenchymatous tissue, and what does this imply about the evolutionary loss of vascular features in smaller tissue geometries?