Miyazawa2010 - changing turing patterns by spatial parameter sweep

Biologists have long been fascinated by the amazing diversity of animal colour patterns. Despite much interest, the underlying evolutionary and developmental mechanisms contributing to their rich variety remain largely unknown, especially the vivid and complex colour patterns seen in vertebrates. The model [1] shows, that complex and camouflaged animal markings can be formed by the ‘blending’ of simple colour patterns. A mathematical model predicts that crossing between animals having inverted spot patterns (for example, ‘light spots on a dark background’ and ‘ dark spots on a light background’ ) will necessarily result in hybrid offspring that have camouflaged labyrinthine patterns as ‘ blended ’ intermediate phenotypes. In [1] the authors confirmed the broad applicability of the model prediction by empirical examination of natural and artificial hybrids of salmonid fish. The results suggest an unexplored evolutionary process by means of ‘pattern blending’, as one of the possible mechanisms underlying colour pattern diversity and hybrid speciation. The model file is in MorpheusML format and can be opened in the free, open-source multicellular modeling software Morpheus (https://morpheus.gitlab.io) to simulate the time course (movie) of the spatio-temporal dynamics. It resembles figure 3a from [1], where a 2D parameter space shows the transition from black to white spots through intermediate labyrinthine patterns. 1. Miyazawa, Okamoto and Kondo, Blending of animal colour patterns by hybridization, Nature Communications, 2010