Embryonic lateral inhibition as optical modes: an analytical framework for mesoscopic pattern formation

Abstract

Cellular checkerboard patterns are observed at many developmental stages of embryos. We study an analytically tractable model for lateral inhibition and show that a coupling coefficient with a negative value is sufficient to obtain noisy or periodic checkerboard patterns. We solve the case of a linear chain of cells explicitly and show that noisy anti-correlated patterns are available in a post-critical regime $({\epsilon }_c<\epsilon <0)$. In the sub-critical regime $(-\infty <\epsilon \le {\epsilon }_c)$ a periodic and alternating steady state is available, where pattern selection is determined by making an analogy with the optical modes of phonons. For cells arranged in a hexagonal lattice, the sub-critical pattern can be driven into three different states: two of those states are periodic checkerboards and a third in which both periodic states coexist.

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