Old math reveals new secrets about these alluring flowers

Old math reveals new secrets about these alluring flowers

Turing’s algorithms paint monkeyflowers

The dots that dapple wildly diverse monkeyflower petals are the result of a tug-of-war between two genes — and evidence for a decades-old theory by mathematician Alan Turing. Turing’s ‘reaction–diffusion’ model explains how chemicals with opposite effects can interact to create patterns in a variety of organisms, from seashells to zebra stripes. Researchers genetically altered monkeyflowers in the laboratory to observe how the two genes generate an activator molecule and a repressor molecule to produce the stunning variety of the blossoms.

National Geographic | 7 min readReference: Current Biology paper