Alan Turing was a brilliant mathematician, cryptographer, and logician, plus the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. He also worked in biology, and now, 58 years after his tragic death, science has confirmed one of his old biological hypotheses.
Turing's idea was that biological patterns - such as a tiger's stripes or a leopard's spots - are formed by the interactions of a pair of morphogens, which are the signaling molecules that govern tissue development. The particular pair that Turing proposed was an activator and an inhibitor. Turing proposed that the activator would form something like a tiger's stripe, but then interaction with the inhibitor would shut down its expression, creating a blank space. Then the process would reverse, and the next stripe would form. The interaction of these two morphogens would combine to create the full stripe pattern.
This hypothesis has remained mostly just speculation until now, as researchers at King's College London have now tested the idea in the mouths of mice. The roofs of mice's mouths contain regularly spaced ridges, and the researchers discovered the precise two morphogens that were working as activator and inhibitor to create the pattern, just as Turing suggested. What's more, when the researchers tampered with one morphogen or the other to increase or decrease their activity, the pattern of the ridges changed just as Turing's initial equations predicted they would.
MORE HERE>>
No comments:
Post a Comment