Coupling Turing stripes to active flows

TL;DR

This study investigates how active nematic flows influence Turing pattern formation, revealing that uniform activity can dissolve patterns while coupled activity induces shear flows and pattern rearrangements, relevant to biological mechanochemistry.

Contribution

It introduces a numerical framework coupling active nematic hydrodynamics with Turing models, exploring how activity modulates pattern stability and organization.

Findings

Uniform activity dissolves Turing patterns due to balanced fluxes.

Coupled activity leads to shear flows and stripe fracture.

Active instabilities control pattern crossover regimes.

Abstract

We numerically solve the active nematohydrodynamic equations of motion, coupled to a Turing reaction-diffusion model, to study the effect of active nematic flow on the stripe patterns resulting from a Turing instability. If the activity is uniform across the system, the Turing patterns dissociate when the flux from active advection balances that from the reaction-diffusion process. If the activity is coupled to the concentration of Turing morphogens, and neighbouring stripes have equal and opposite activity, the system self organises into a pattern of shearing flows, with stripes tending to fracture and slip sideways to join their neighbours. We discuss the role of active instabilities in controlling the crossover between these limits, Our results are of relevance to mechanochemical coupling in biological systems.