Single-morphogen Turing instability driven by nonlinear intracellular-extracellular coupling

Abstract

We show that compartmentalizing a single molecular species into intracellular and extracellular fields, and coupling them through membrane transport or nonlinear basal production rates, can produce diffusion-driven (Turing) instabilities. By linearizing the two-field system, we derive the corresponding Turing conditions under which such instabilities may arise. We present three biologically motivated examples that satisfy these conditions and demonstrate the resulting spatial patterns through numerical simulations. These results indicate that tissue compartmentalization alone might enable pattern formation traditionally attributed to multi-species systems.