Overview
- Published October 27, 2025 in Matter, the study is titled “Imperfect Turing Patterns: Diffusiophoretic Assembly of Hard Spheres via Reaction-Diffusion Instabilities” (DOI: 10.1016/j.matt.2025.102513).
- The work builds on Alan Turing’s reaction–diffusion framework by incorporating diffusiophoresis, which generates sharper pattern boundaries than classic models.
- Assigning realistic size variability to simulated pigment cells produced breaks, grainy textures, and variable stripe widths that better match nature.
- Tests on the ornate boxfish’s hexagon motif showed that diffusiophoresis alone yielded overly uniform patterns, which became more lifelike when cell-size differences were included.
- The results come from computational simulations rather than in vivo experiments, and the authors plan to add more complex interactions as they explore applications such as adaptive materials and targeted drug delivery.