Turing’s diffusive threshold in random reaction-diffusion systems

Turing instabilities of reaction-diffusion systems can only arise if the diffusivities of the chemical species are sufficiently different. This threshold is unphysical in most systems with N = 2 diffusing species, forcing experimental realizations of the instability to rely on fluctuations or additional nondiffusing species. Here we ask whether this diffusive threshold lowers for N > 2 to allow “true” Turing instabilities. Inspired by May’s analysis of the stability of random ecological communities, we analyze the probability distribution of the diffusive threshold in reaction-diffusion systems defined by random matrices describing linearized dynamics near a homogeneous fixed point. In the numerically tractable cases N ≤ 6, we find that the diffusive threshold becomes more likely to be smaller and physical as N increases and that most of these many-species instabilities cannot be described by reduced models with fewer species.