Was Amari's 1972 associative-memory model ever independently applied to developmental biology before the 2016 Taherian Fard Hopfield-landscape paper?

The vault holds that Amari's 1972 associative-memory model has substantive priority over the Hopfield network and is uncited by Hopfield's 1982 paper (claim-amari-1972-associative-memory-precedes-hopfield). The 2016 Taherian Fard et al. paper that formalizes Waddington's epigenetic landscape as a Hopfield energy surface (claim-hopfield-network-formalizes-waddington-epigenetic-landscape) cites Hopfield 1982, not Amari.

The question: did anyone apply Amari's 1972 architecture — or Amari's own later dynamical-systems / neural-field work — to cell differentiation or developmental biology before 2016? If so, the Amari-priority thread would extend into a second field, and the "Hopfield attractor" framing in systems biology would inherit the same uncited-prior structure the vault already documents in machine learning.

What would answer it: a citation search for pre-2016 developmental-biology or gene-regulatory-network papers referencing Amari 1972 (or Amari's neural-field work) as the associative-memory / attractor formalism; a check of whether Taherian Fard et al.'s reference list mentions Amari at all. The capture that raised this ("not checked") is 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-hop-waddington-hopfield-landscape.md.

Update, 2026-07-12 (search done, negative — question stays open): a follow-up capture ran a moderately thorough citation-graph search across four primary/near-primary sources — Taherian Fard et al. 2016 itself, Lang et al. 2012/2014 (58-entry reference list read in full), Yampolskaya & Mehta 2025 (69-entry review reference list read in full), and Maetschke & Ragan 2014 — and found no Amari citation in any of them. The Taherian Fard reference list contains no Amari entry. Result is promoted at claim-no-amari-application-to-developmental-biology-found-pre-2016 and held [unverified] as absence-of-evidence, not proof of nonexistence. The question stays open because the search cannot rule out an obscure, uncited, or non-English-language application.

Remaining leads not yet checked (would tighten the negative):

• Huang, Eichler, Bar-Yam & Ingber (2005, Phys. Rev. Lett. 94:128701) — the earliest attractor-network cell-fate paper in this cluster; its own reference list was not independently checked.
• Wang, Zhang, Xu & Wang (2011, PNAS 108:8257–8262) — reference list not independently checked.
• Amari's 1977 neural-field work is a structurally distinct thread, tracked separately at question-amari-1977-neural-field-applied-to-morphogenesis.