Stochastic Turing patterns in a synthetic bacterial population
Author(s)
Karig, David; Martini, K. Michael; Lu, Ting; Goldenfeld, Nigel; DeLateur, Nicholas Andrew; Weiss, Ron; ... Show more Show less
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The origin of biological morphology and form is one of the deepest problems in science, underlying our understanding of development and the functioning of living systems. In 1952, Alan Turing showed that chemical morphogenesis could arise from a linear instability of a spatially uniform state, giving rise to periodic pattern formation in reaction–diffusion systems but only those with a rapidly diffusing inhibitor and a slowly diffusing activator. These conditions are disappointingly hard to achieve in nature, and the role of Turing instabilities in biological pattern formation has been called into question. Recently, the theory was extended to include noisy activator–inhibitor birth and death processes. Surprisingly, this stochastic Turing theory predicts the existence of patterns over a wide range of parameters, in particular with no severe requirement on the ratio of activator–inhibitor diffusion coefficients. To explore whether this mechanism is viable in practice, we have genetically engineered a synthetic bacterial population in which the signaling molecules form a stochastic activator–inhibitor system. The synthetic pattern-forming gene circuit destabilizes an initially homogenous lawn of genetically engineered bacteria, producing disordered patterns with tunable features on a spatial scale much larger than that of a single cell. Spatial correlations of the experimental patterns agree quantitatively with the signature predicted by theory. These results show that Turing-type pattern-forming mechanisms, if driven by stochasticity, can potentially underlie a broad range of biological patterns. These findings provide the groundwork for a unified picture of biological morphogenesis, arising from a combination of stochastic gene expression and dynamical instabilities. Keywords: Turing patterns; biofilm; synthetic biology; signaling molecules; stochastic gene expression
Date issued
2018-05Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Biological Engineering; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of ChemistryJournal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences (U.S.)
Citation
Karig, David et al. “Stochastic Turing Patterns in a Synthetic Bacterial Population.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, 26 (June 2018): 6572–6577 © 2018 National Academy of Sciences
Version: Final published version
ISSN
0027-8424
1091-6490