Introduction to 'Recent progress and open frontiers in Turing's theory of morphogenesis'.

Abstract

Elucidating pattern forming processes is an important problem in the physical, chemical and biological sciences. Turing's contribution, after being initially neglected, eventually catalysed a huge amount of work from mathematicians, physicists, chemists and biologists aimed towards understanding how steady spatial patterns can emerge from homogeneous chemical mixtures due to the reaction and diffusion of different chemical species. While this theory has been developed mathematically and investigated experimentally for over half a century, many questions still remain unresolved. This theme issue places Turing's theory of pattern formation in a modern context, discussing the current frontiers in foundational aspects of pattern formation in reaction-diffusion and related systems. It highlights ongoing work in chemical, synthetic and developmental settings which is helping to elucidate how important Turing's mechanism is for real morphogenesis, while highlighting gaps that remain in matching theory to reality. The theme issue also surveys a variety of recent mathematical research pushing the boundaries of Turing's original theory to more realistic and complicated settings, as well as discussing open theoretical challenges in the analysis of such models. It aims to consolidate current research frontiers and highlight some of the most promising future directions.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Recent progress and open frontiers in Turing’s theory of morphogenesis’.