On the Growth of Cellular Tissues Under Constant and Fluctuating Environmental Conditions

Abstract

Today dissipative structures are at the center of interest of a noticeable part of the scientific community. This is particularly true in biology, where the discovery of reaction diffusion instabilities has opened a wholly new area of research on self organization. New types of dissipative structures, such as chemical clocks and reaction diffusion patterns, have become subjects of widespread interest. Their occurrence has been invoked in the explanation of a multitude of phenomena of self organization in biology. Examples include cellular differentiation, mitotic control, pattern formation, cellular communication, amoeba aggregation.¹ Generally speaking one may say that reaction diffusion instabilities show how molecules or cells can “communicate” over macroscopic times and distances using the very type of chemical processes and transport phenomena ubiquitously present in living systems.