PUBLICATION
How animals get their skin patterns: fish pigment pattern as a live Turing wave
- Authors
- Kondo, S., Iwashita, M., and Yamaguchi, M.
- ID
- ZDB-PUB-090629-33
- Date
- 2009
- Source
- The International journal of developmental biology 53(5-6): 851-856 (Review)
- Registered Authors
- Kondo, Shigeru
- Keywords
- pattern formation, reaction-diffusion system, zebrafish, pigment cell, Turing
- MeSH Terms
-
- Animals
- Body Patterning*
- Developmental Biology/methods*
- Diffusion
- Genomics
- Models, Biological
- Models, Theoretical
- Morphogenesis/genetics
- Mutation
- Skin
- Skin Physiological Phenomena
- Skin Pigmentation*
- Zebrafish
- PubMed
- 19557690 Full text @ Int. J. Dev. Biol.
Citation
Kondo, S., Iwashita, M., and Yamaguchi, M. (2009) How animals get their skin patterns: fish pigment pattern as a live Turing wave. The International journal of developmental biology. 53(5-6):851-856.
Abstract
It is more than fifty years since Alan Turing first presented the reaction-diffusion (RD) model, to account for the mechanism of biological pattern formation. In the paper entitled "The chemical basis of morphogenesis", Turing concluded that spatial patterns autonomously made in the embryo are generated as the stationary wave of the chemical (cellular) reactions. Although this novel idea was paid little attention by experimental biologists, recent experimental data are suggesting that the RD mechanism really functions in some of the course of animal development. Among the phenomena in which involvement of the RD mechanism is suspected, the striped pigment pattern of zebrafish has been highlighted as an ideal model system for the following reasons: the stationary wave made by the RD mechanism stays alive and can be observed only in the fish skin; and in zebrafish, we can utilize genomic information and molecular genetic techniques to clarify the molecular basis of pattern formation. In this review, we summarize recent progresses in the study of zebrafish pigment pattern formation that is uncovering how the RD wave is made and maintained in the skin.
Genes / Markers
Expression
Phenotype
Mutations / Transgenics
Human Disease / Model
Sequence Targeting Reagents
Fish
Orthology
Engineered Foreign Genes
Mapping