Researchers engineer bacteria to exhibit stochastic Turing patterns
(PHYSorg.com Physics)

How did the zebra get its stripes, or the leopard its spots? Mankind has been trying to answer such questions since our earliest recorded days, and they resonate throughout the extant mythologies and folklores of an earlier world. In modern times, we`ve looked to mathematical models and most recently to genomic science to uncover the explanation of how patterns form in living tissues, but a full answer has proven particularly hard to get at.