Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Activator-Inhibitor Control Of Tissue Growth, John A. Adam

Mathematics & Statistics Faculty Publications

This note develops a simple model for the competition between activator and inhibitor control mechanisms in one-dimensional tissue growth. The pedagogic usefulness of such a model is that it is easily accessible to undergraduate applied mathematicians and is suggestive of behavior known to occur in more realistic biological systems (e.g., some types of cancer). The limitations of the model are obvious and can provide a basis for discussion of the applicability of complementary levels of description in mathematical modeling.