History dependence and the continuum approximation breakdown: the impact of domain growth on Turing’s instability

Abstract

A diffusively driven instability has been hypothesized as a mechanism to drive spatial self-organization in biological systems since the seminal work of Turing. Such systems are often considered on a growing domain, but traditional theoretical studies have only treated the domain size as a bifurcation parameter, neglecting the system non-autonomy. More recently, the conditions for a diffusively driven instability on a growing domain have been determined under stringent conditions, including slow growth, a restriction on the temporal interval over which the prospect of an instability can be considered and a neglect of the impact that time evolution has on the stability properties of the homogeneous reference state from which heterogeneity emerges. Here, we firstly relax this latter assumption and observe that the conditions for the Turing instability are much more complex and depend on the history of the system in general. We proceed to relax all the above constraints, making analytical progress by focusing on specific examples. With faster growth, instabilities can grow transiently and decay, making the prediction of a prospective Turing instability much more difficult. In addition, arbitrarily high spatial frequencies can destabilize, in which case the continuum approximation is predicted to break down.