Institute of Fundamental Technological Research

The phenomenon of chondrogenic pattern formation in the vertebrate limb is one of the best studied examples of organogenesis. Many different models, mathematical as well as conceptual, have been proposed for it in the last fifty years or so. In this review, we give a brief overview of the fundamental biological background, then describe in detail several models which aim to describe qualitatively and quantitatively the corresponding biological phenomena. We concentrate on several new models that have been proposed in recent years, taking into account recent experimental progress. The major mathematical tools in these approaches are ordinary and partial differential equations. Moreover, we discuss models with non-local flux terms used to account for cell-cell adhesion forces and a structured population model with diffusion. We also include a detailed list of gene products and potential morphogens which have been identified to play a role in the process of limb formation and its growth.

mathematical models of chondrogenesis, reaction-diffusion equations, pattern formation, limb development

In the paper we examine solutions to a model of cell movement governed by the chemotaxis phenomenon derived in [14] and established via macroscopic limits of corresponding microscopic cell-based models with extended cell representations. The model is given by two PDEs for the density of cells and the concentration of a chemical. To avoid singularities in cell density, the aggregating force of chemotaxis phenomenon is attenuated by a density dependent diffusion of cells, which grows to infinity with density tending to a certain critical value. In this paper we recover the quasi-periodic structures provided by this model by means of (local in time) expansion of the solution into a basis of eigenfunctions of the linearized system. Both planar and spherical geometries are considered.

pattern formation, chemotaxis, Turing bifurcation, eigenfunction expansion