Effect of obstructions on growing Turing patterns

Abstract

We study how Turing pattern formation on a growing domain is affected by discrete domain discontinuities. We use the Lengyel–Epstein reaction–diffusion model to numerically simulate Turing pattern formation on radially expanding circular domains containing a variety of obstruction geometries, including obstructions spanning the length of the domain, such as walls and slits, and local obstructions, such as small blocks. The pattern formation is significantly affected by the obstructions, leading to novel pattern morphologies. We show that obstructions can induce growth mode switching and disrupt local pattern formation and that these effects depend on the shape and placement of the objects as well as the domain growth rate. This work provides a customizable framework to perform numerical simulations on different types of obstructions and other heterogeneous domains, which may guide future numerical and experimental studies. These results may also provide new insights into biological pattern growth and formation, especially in non-idealized domains containing noise or discontinuities.