A zebra's stripes, a seashell's spirals, a butterfly's symmetrical wings - patterns in nature have fascinated people for millennia. And the question of how they are formed has baffled scientists for centuries.
But now a team of Hong Kong scientists has helped unlock the mystery. Working with other scientists, they spent three years on a fundamental question: how do living cells arrange themselves to form such beautiful and ordered patterns in multicellular organisms?
Using a new approach, they uncovered not the whole answer, but a basic principle that will allow them to control and form an organism's pattern by tweaking and changing bits of its genetic formula. These insights will be useful for further research in genetics and medicine.
'Questions like why human beings have five digits in each limb, whereas cattle and horses only have two and one, respectively, have always interested me,' said Dr Huang Jiandong, associate professor of biochemistry at The University of Hong Kong.
'We now understand the logic behind why and how living organisms form in certain ways, which brings us closer to being able to control how things will grow.'
Huang led about a dozen in a team of researchers from Baptist University, the University of California in San Diego, the University of Marburg in Germany, as well as HKU.