A Markovian lattice model for photoreceptor cells is introduced to describe the growth of mosaic patterns on fish retina. The radial stripe pattern observed in wild-type zebrafish is shown to be selected naturally during the retina growth, against th
e geometrically equivalent, circular stripe pattern. The mechanism of such dynamical pattern selection is clarified on the basis of both numerical simulations and theoretical analyses, which find that the successive emergence of local defects plays a critical role in the realization of the wild-type pattern.
Reaction diffusion systems with Turing instability and mass conservation are studied. In such systems, abrupt decays of stripes follow quasi-stationary states in sequence. At steady state, the distance between stripes is much longer than that estimat
ed by linear stability analysis at a homogeneous state given by alternative stability conditions. We show that there exist systems in which a one-stripe pattern is solely steady state for an arbitrary size of the systems. The applicability to cell biology is discussed.
