Bifurcations in Turing systems of the second kind may explain blastula cleavage plane orientation.

ABSTRACT

Spontaneous pattern formation (emergence of Turing structures) may take place in biological systems as primary and secondary bifurcations to nonlinear parabolic partial differential equations describing biochemical reaction-diffusion systems. Bipolarity in mitosis and cleavage planes in cytokinesis may be related to this formation of prepatterns. Cleavage planes in early blastulas have an apparently well controlled spatial relationship to the polarity known as the animal-vegetal (A-V) axis the mitotic spindles form perpendicular to this axis in the first two division stages, with cleavage planes going strictly through the A-V poles. The third-stage spindles are parallel to the A-V axis, and cleavage is roughly in the equatorial plane, thus separating the A-V poles. The reason for these phenomena are poorly understood with current mitosis/cytokinesis models based on intrinsic spindle properties. It is shown here by numerical simulation that a simple modification to the usual Turing equations yield selection rules which lead directly to these orientations of the prepatterns, without any further ad hoc assumptions. These results strongly support the prepattern model for mitosis and cytokinesis and the viewpoint that prepatterns play a fundamental role in nature.