Figure 2.

Simulating lateral inhibition patterning. (a) A schematic of the lateral inhibition patterning. Initially homogeneous cells (light grey) compete to express an inhibitory signal. Eventually a single cell becomes active (dark grey) and strongly inhibits the expression of the signal in its contacting neighbours. (b) The outcome of lateral inhibition signalling expressed as a probabilistic rule set. The signalling probability determines whether a single cell in a field will express an inhibitory signal based on the total number of its active signalling neighbours (n). (c) An asynchronous cellular automata simulation of lateral inhibition. Cells in the 8 × 8 hexagonally packed array are sequentially selected at random and updated according to the rule table in (b). The outcome is a notably disordered packing of active cells (dark grey) expressing the inhibitory signal.