Simulating strange attraction of acellular slime mould Physarum

 polycephaum to herbal tablets

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

Plasmodium of acellular slime mould Physarum polycephalum exhibits traits of wave-like behaviour. The plasmodium's behaviour can be finely tuned in laboratory experiments by using herbal tablets. A single tablet acts as a fixed attractor: plasmodium propagates towards the tablet, envelops the tablet with its body and stays around the tablet for several days. Being presented with several tablets the plasmodium executes limit cycle like motions. The plasmodium performs sophisticated routines of movement around tablets: rotation, splitting, and annihilation. We use to two-variable Oregonator model to simulate the plasmodium behaviour in presence of the herbal tablets. Numerical experiments confirm that using long-distance attracting and short-distance repelling fields we can organise arbitrary movement of plasmodia.

Related collections

Most cited references 21

Record: found
Abstract: not found
Article: not found

On the shape of a set of points in the plane

H Edelsbrunner, R D Kirkpatrick, R Seidel (1983)

0 comments Cited 230 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

Amoeboid organism solves complex nutritional challenges.

Audrey Dussutour, Tanya Latty, Madeleine Beekman … (2010)

A fundamental question in nutritional biology is how distributed systems maintain an optimal supply of multiple nutrients essential for life and reproduction. In the case of animals, the nutritional requirements of the cells within the body are coordinated by the brain in neural and chemical dialogue with sensory systems and peripheral organs. At the level of an insect society, the requirements for the entire colony are met by the foraging efforts of a minority of workers responding to cues emanating from the brood. Both examples involve components specialized to deal with nutrient supply and demand (brains and peripheral organs, foragers and brood). However, some of the most species-rich, largest, and ecologically significant heterotrophic organisms on earth, such as the vast mycelial networks of fungi, comprise distributed networks without specialized centers: How do these organisms coordinate the search for multiple nutrients? We address this question in the acellular slime mold Physarum polycephalum and show that this extraordinary organism can make complex nutritional decisions, despite lacking a coordination center and comprising only a single vast multinucleate cell. We show that a single slime mold is able to grow to contact patches of different nutrient quality in the precise proportions necessary to compose an optimal diet. That such organisms have the capacity to maintain the balance of carbon- and nitrogen-based nutrients by selective foraging has considerable implications not only for our understanding of nutrient balancing in distributed systems but for the functional ecology of soils, nutrient cycling, and carbon sequestration.