1/18/2024 0 Comments Irregular tessellation patternsThe funders played no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Ĭentral to current theories of biological organisation is a distinction between constraint and process. SPW and AJ-R are also supported by the EU Horizon 2020 programme through the FET Flagship Human Brain Project (HBP-SGA3, 945539). įunding: This work was supported by a Collaborative Activity Award, Cortical Plasticity Within and Across Lifetimes, from the James S McDonnell Foundation (grant 220020516 ) to SPW. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: Code for running the simulations reported in this paper is available at. Received: JAccepted: FebruPublished: March 28, 2022Ĭopyright: © 2022 Brooke et al. Our analysis provides a means for testing current theories about the fundamental role that constraints play in organising biological systems.Ĭitation: Brooke JM, James SS, Jimenez-Rodriguez A, Wilson SP (2022) Biological action at a distance: Correlated pattern formation in adjacent tessellation domains without communication. In more general terms, our analysis reveals that strong relationships between patterns that form in adjacent biological domains are to be expected based purely on geometrical effects, even if no information is exchanged between those domains during the process of pattern formation. Applying this test to patterns of cell density measured in the developing neocortex confirms that cortical column boundaries constrain pattern formation during the first postnatal weeks. Here we develop a novel test for the influence of boundary shape on pattern formation, based on comparing patterns contained by boundaries whose shapes tessellate and thus are geometrically related. But observing that a particular pattern is contained by a boundary is not enough to determine whether or not that boundary was a constraint on pattern formation. Patterns that form in this way are known to reflect the shape of the boundary conditions that contain them. Patterns can form in biological systems as a net effect of dynamical interactions that are excitatory over short distances and inhibitory over larger distances. In more general terms, this result demonstrates how causal links can be established between the dynamical processes through which biological patterns emerge and the constraints that shape them. We then confirm such a prediction by analysing the development of ‘subbarrel’ patterns, which are thought to emerge via reaction-diffusion, and whose enclosing borders form a Voronoi tessellation on the surface of the rodent somatosensory cortex. Based on the prediction that correlations between adjacent patterns should be bimodally distributed, we develop methods for testing whether a given set of domain boundaries constrained pattern formation within those domains. The effect holds in systems with linear and non-linear diffusive terms, and for boundary shapes derived from regular and irregular tessellations. We confirm this paradoxical effect, by simulating pattern formation via reaction-diffusion in domains whose boundary shapes tessellate, and showing that correlations between adjacent patterns are strong compared to controls that self-organize in domains with equivalent sizes but unrelated shapes. Tessellations emerge in many natural systems, and the constituent domains often contain regular patterns, raising the intriguing possibility that pattern formation within adjacent domains might be correlated by the geometry, without the direct exchange of information between parts comprising either domain.
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