REDHatGIRL

Personally I didn’t know that the question of how a tiger gets its stripes was such an important question but apparently it is, and one that famous mathematician, cryptographer, and biologist Alan Turing had figured the answer t o some 50 years ago with one of his biological hypotheses.

Up until now his work was only hypothetical but he believed that both a tiger’s stripes and a leopard’s spots were formed by the interactions of a pair of morphogens. These are the signalling molecules whose purpose is to govern tissue development and the particular pairing that Turing proposed was an activator and an inhibitor.

What Turning proposed was that the activator would form something like a tiger’s stripe but the interaction with the inhibitor would shut down its expression thus creating a blank space; at which point the process would reverse creating the next stripe.

As said earlier this work by Turing was merely speculation but researchers at King’s College London have tested his hypothesis in the mouths of mice. It seems that the roof of a mouse’s mouth contain regularly spaced ridges and upon studying this researchers found the precise two morphogens that were working as activator and inhibitor to create the pattern.

Dr Jeremy Green suggested that this is the first experimental confirmation to Turing’s proposal and added:

“Regularly spaced structures, from vertebrae and hair follicles to the stripes on a tiger or zebrafish, are a fundamental motif in biology. There are several theories about how patterns in nature are formed, but until now there was only circumstantial evidence for Turing’s mechanism. Our study provides the first experimental identification of an activator-inhibitor system at work in the generation of stripes – in this case, in the ridges of the mouth palate. Although important in feeling and tasting food, ridges in the mouth are not of great medical significance. However, they have proven extremely valuable here in validating an old theory of the activator-inhibitor model first put forward by Alan Turing in the 50s.”

via io9

So not only is Alan Turing the father of computers but he also crack the mystery of the tiger stripes. I wonder which he will be remembered more for eh.