A living mesoscopic cellular automaton made of skin scales

Liana Manukyan, Sophie A. Montandon, Anamarija Fofonjka, Stanislav Smirnov and Michel C. Milinkovitch ()
Additional contact information
Liana Manukyan: Laboratory of Artificial and Natural Evolution (LANE), University of Geneva
Sophie A. Montandon: Laboratory of Artificial and Natural Evolution (LANE), University of Geneva
Anamarija Fofonjka: Laboratory of Artificial and Natural Evolution (LANE), University of Geneva
Stanislav Smirnov: University of Geneva
Michel C. Milinkovitch: Laboratory of Artificial and Natural Evolution (LANE), University of Geneva

Nature, 2017, vol. 544, issue 7649, 173-179

Abstract: Abstract In vertebrates, skin colour patterns emerge from nonlinear dynamical microscopic systems of cell interactions. Here we show that in ocellated lizards a quasi-hexagonal lattice of skin scales, rather than individual chromatophore cells, establishes a green and black labyrinthine pattern of skin colour. We analysed time series of lizard scale colour dynamics over four years of their development and demonstrate that this pattern is produced by a cellular automaton (a grid of elements whose states are iterated according to a set of rules based on the states of neighbouring elements) that dynamically computes the colour states of individual mesoscopic skin scales to produce the corresponding macroscopic colour pattern. Using numerical simulations and mathematical derivation, we identify how a discrete von Neumann cellular automaton emerges from a continuous Turing reaction–diffusion system. Skin thickness variation generated by three-dimensional morphogenesis of skin scales causes the underlying reaction–diffusion dynamics to separate into microscopic and mesoscopic spatial scales, the latter generating a cellular automaton. Our study indicates that cellular automata are not merely abstract computational systems, but can directly correspond to processes generated by biological evolution.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature22031 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:544:y:2017:i:7649:d:10.1038_nature22031

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature22031

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().