Traveling stripes on the skin of a mutant mouse

In the course of animal development, complex structures form autonomously from the apparently shapeless egg. How cells can produce spatial patterns that are much larger than each cell is one of the key issues in developmental biology. It has been suggested that spatial patterns in animals form through the same principles by which dispatched structures are formed in the nonbiological system. However, because of the complexity of biological systems, molecular details of such phenomena have been rarely clarified. In this article, we introduce an example of a pattern-forming phenomenon that occurs in the skin of mutant mice. The mutant mouse has a defect in splicing of the Foxn1 (Whn or nude) gene, which terminates hair follicle development just after pigment begins to accumulate in the follicle. The immature follicles are rapidly discharged, and a new hair cycle resumes. Eventually, the skin color of the mouse appears to oscillate. The color oscillation is synchronous in juvenile mice, but the phase gradually shifts among skin regions to eventually form traveling, evenly spaced stripes. Although the time scale is quite different, the pattern change in the mutant mouse shares characteristics with the nonlinear waves generated on excitable media, such as the Belousov-Zhabotinskii reaction, suggesting that a common principle underlies the wave pattern formation. Molecular details that underlie the phenomenon can be conjectured from recent molecular studies.