Bioelectric prepattern

Tyler's 2017 review collects the older claims. It quotes Levin (2012b) that for over 60 years spatial patterns of bioelectric parameters have quantitatively predicted anatomical outcomes. Burr, Sinnott and others proposed that the patterns of life are the visible expression of an underlying bioelectrical pattern, as Sinnott put it in 1960.² Levin later described the pattern as a prepattern, a template of shape that can be written to and read from dynamically.² Tyler also reports a possible source of such a pattern in Drosophila oogenesis, where follicle cell voltage and pH patterns are attributed to an uneven distribution of V-ATPases.³

Pietak and Levin (2016) pointed out that ion channels and gap junctions both set, and are gated by, resting potential. They argued that this makes the origin and course of tissue voltage patterns complex and hard to control rationally.¹ Their response was BETSE, a simulator that predicts voltage patterns from channel and gap junction activity.¹ Pai and colleagues (2018) used BETSE to model a neural stage Xenopus embryo. The model predicted that nicotine depolarizes the tissue by about 15 mV, and imaging of treated embryos matched this in direction and size.⁴

Pai and colleagues (2020) summarise earlier Xenopus work. At the start of neurulation the neural plate is hyperpolarized relative to the surrounding ectoderm. They report that brain patterning depends on the contrast between the two, not on absolute voltage.⁵ Removing the contrast produced serious brain defects whatever the absolute voltage.⁵ In the 2018 work, misexpressing HCN2 restored the prepattern that nicotine had disrupted.⁴ Levin (2025) reports that restoring the prepattern in the neural plate corrected brain form, gene expression and learning in animals exposed to alcohol, nicotine or a Notch mutation.⁹

Levin (2023) describes the electric face, seen with a voltage-sensitive dye in the anterior ectoderm of the early frog embryo. It marks where gene expression and later structures will form. Shifting it artificially changes later development in predictable ways.⁷ Levin (2025) reports that potassium channel misexpression in Xenopus produces ectopic eyes, recreating the voltage eye spot of the electric face.⁸ Levin (2022) argues that such pattern memories, like the voltage distribution telling planarian cells to build one head or two, separate data from machinery. On this view evolution can alter the encoded setpoints and reuse the same machinery.⁶