New Format: Experimental and Theoretical Perspectives 

The new format for our Lunchtime Mixers, was suggested by our community. For these novel sessions we bring together invited external speakers and their Durham collaborators to present their research sharing their perspectives on their research in a series of short talks. 

Vertebrate skin as a testbed for rethinking theories of tissue-scale pattern formation

Andrew Krause (Durham, Mathematical Sciences) and Denis Headon (Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh).  

27 June, 12 - 1.30 pm

Longstanding theory has shown that periodic, repeating patterns in developing tissues can be produced by systems involving local activation and lateral inhibition that form symmetry-breaking networks for self-organisation. A notable example of such systems are Turing reaction-diffusion networks of activators and inhibitors, which could be operating at the level of gene expression or via other cell state changes.  We highlight examples where these classical theoretical models can be used as parsimonious explanations of patterning across taxa and tissues, even subject to experimental perturbations. However, we also showcase findings which challenge the simplicity of these models of pattern formation. Such challenges include understanding the robustness of patterning within epithelial-mesenchymal composite organs, like skin, gut and lung, where different parts of the tissue may exhibit simultaneous utilisation of a variety of distinct pattern forming motifs. For example, intercellular signalling may readily dominate between the relatively immobile cells of the epithelium, while in the underlying mesenchyme, cell movement and cell-extracellular matrix interactions may act to drive patterning. Coexistence of many distinct pattern-forming mechanisms within a single tissue raises fundamental problems of determining the key drivers of patterning and subsequent morphological changes, despite experimental protocols designed to disentangle them. These examples also raise issues in constraining models through experiment, despite increasingly high-resolution experimental data. We end in discussing important challenges for both theory and experiment, highlighting how close collaboration between the two is necessary to make meaningful progress towards understanding the origin of these patterns.

Dates for 2025-2026

24 October 2025, 12-1.30pm, Prof. Alice Pyne (University of Sheffield) 

24 November 2025, 12-1.30pm

12 December 2025,  12-1.30pm

26 January 2026,  12-1.30pm

27 February 2026,  12-1.30pm

20 April 2026,  12-1.30pm

29 May 2026,  12-1.30pm

22 June 2026,  12-1.30pm