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Extending the Mathematical Palette for Developmental Pattern Formation: Piebaldism

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Abstract

Here, we present a theoretical investigation with potential insights on developmental mechanisms. Three biological factors, consisting of two diffusing factors and a cell-autonomous immobile transcription factor are combined with different feedback mechanisms. This results in four different situations or fur patterns. Two of them reproduce classical Turing patterns: (1) regularly spaced spots, (2) labyrinth patterns or straight lines with an initial slope in the activation of the transcription factor. The third situation does not lead to patterns, but results in different homogeneous color tones. Finally, the fourth one sheds new light on the possible mechanisms leading to the formation of piebald patterns exemplified by the random patterns on the fur of some cows’ strains and Dalmatian dogs. Piebaldism is usually manifested as white areas of fur, hair, or skin due to the absence of pigment-producing cells in those regions. The distribution of the white and colored zones does not reflect the classical Turing patterns. We demonstrate that these piebald patterns are of transient nature, developing from random initial conditions and relying on a system’s bistability. We show numerically that the presence of a cell-autonomous factor not only expands the range of reaction diffusion parameters in which a pattern may arise, but also extends the pattern-forming abilities of the reaction–diffusion equations.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Yannik Willing, Nina Hedvig Eriksen, and Viktoria Szabolcsi for providing the photographs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics, University of Fribourg, Chemin du Musée 23, 1700, Fribourg, Switzerland

    Michaël Dougoud & Christian Mazza

  2. Anatomy, Section of Medicine, University of Fribourg, Route Albert-Gockel 1, 1700, Fribourg, Switzerland

    Beat Schwaller & László Pecze

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  1. Michaël Dougoud
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  2. Christian Mazza
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  4. László Pecze
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Correspondence to László Pecze.

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Dougoud, M., Mazza, C., Schwaller, B. et al. Extending the Mathematical Palette for Developmental Pattern Formation: Piebaldism. Bull Math Biol 81, 1461–1478 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11538-019-00569-1

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