The emergence of Turing patterns on growing domains

• Grant number: 22/00257-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: July 01, 2022
• End date: June 30, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Chemistry - Physical-Chemistry
• Principal Investigator: Alejandro López Castillo
• Grantee: Leonardo Silva Dias
• Supervisor: Irving Robert Epstein
• Host Institution: Centro de Ciências Exatas e de Tecnologia (CCET). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Brandeis University, United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 19/23205-3 - Theoretical study of the complex kinetics of catalytic processes, BP.DR

Abstract

Over the past decades, Turing patterns have been commonly used as chemical models to understand symmetry-breaking processes observed in biology. Such an approach has yielded numerous insights and novel patterning behaviors. Most of this information was obtained from experiments performed with static domains, ignoring a relevant mechanism to biological systems, which is growth. Scientific investigations have confirmed domain growth has a significant impact on biological pattern formation; however, there is little information about how it affects the process of patterning. Considering that, scientists have studied Turing pattern formation in 1D and 2D systems undergoing isotropic domain growth. The results indicated a strong dependence between the final pattern morphology and the growth rate. Even though these studies contributed to the understanding of the influences of growth on pattern formation, they represent an ideal situation, since growth in living organisms is rarely isotropic. Therefore, considering the ideas mentioned, this project intends to extend previous investigations to analyze the effects of anisotropic domain growth on the emergence of Turing patterns in a 2D chemical system. This will be accomplished considering, e.g., elliptically and more "biologically" shaped domains, and exploring the photosensitivity property of the CDIMA reaction to control the size of the system. Both theoretical and experimental approaches will be performed by the group. The results of this work may help specialists in biological systems in the identification of important chemical species to Turing pattern formation, leading to a deeper understanding of how such structures emerge in living organisms. (AU)