With the travelling wave coordinate , the reaction-diffusion system becomes
At the advancing leading edge the healthy-tissue density is small. Put with . The linearization at gives
so a nonoscillatory decaying front requires real positive roots,
The pulled travelling front selects the Fisher-KPP minimum wave speed, and therefore
For the initial wound , two mirror-image fronts enter from its endpoints. The left front moves right from and the right front moves left from , each with speed approximately . A sequence of sketches would show the initial rectangular depression becoming two smooth monotone transition layers, the zero-density plateau shrinking, and the two layers meeting near before the profile relaxes to . Their meeting time is
There is an additional local relaxation time of order if “close to one” is assigned a fixed numerical tolerance, so the displayed estimate is the dominant healing time when is large compared with the front width .
Write the reaction terms as
A nonzero homogeneous equilibrium satisfies and , hence
For physically positive populations it exists exactly when
The reaction Jacobian matrix at this equilibrium is
Its trace and determinant are
The equilibrium is therefore stable to spatially uniform perturbations when
For a spatial Fourier mode of wavenumber , put . The linearized reaction-diffusion system has matrix
Its trace is smaller than , while
The two-species diffusion-driven instability criterion says that this upward-opening quadratic becomes negative for some precisely when
Combining all conditions, a Turing instability may occur in the region
At onset the discriminant vanishes, and the double root is
The threshold relation gives
so the critical wavenumber is
If , uniform stability requires whereas diffusion-driven instability requires . These inequalities are incompatible, so the Turing region vanishes.
A spatially homogeneous equilibrium of a reaction-diffusion system is a constant state satisfying . Since its spatial derivatives vanish, its stability to homogeneous perturbations is determined by the Jacobian matrix ; diffusion can additionally destabilize nonconstant modes.