Reaction and diffusion on growing domains: Scenarios for robust pattern formation

We investigate the sequence of patterns generated by a reaction-diffusion system on a growing domain. We derive a general evolution equation to incorporate domain growth in reaction-diffusion models and consider the case of slow and isotropic domain growth in one spatial dimension. We use a self-similarity argument to predict a frequency-doubling sequence of patterns for exponential domain growth and we find numerically that frequency-doubling is realized for a finite range of exponential growth rate. We consider pattern formation under different forms for the growth and show that in one dimension domain growth may be a mechanism for increased robustness of pattern formation. (C) 1999 Society for Mathematical Biology.