The ability to store and retrieve information gives an organism a distinct advantage when searching for food or
Mucous mold Physarum polycephalum has beendecades has puzzled researchers. This unique organism, which exists at the crossroads between the kingdoms of animals, plants and fungi, provides insight into the early evolutionary history of eukaryotes. Its body is a giant single cell made of interconnected tubes that form complex networks. This single amoeba-like cell can stretch to several centimeters or even meters and is the largest cell on Earth in the Guinness Book of Records.
The amazing abilities of mucous moldsolving complex problems, such as finding the shortest path through the maze, earned her the title of intelligent unicellular. And it also intrigued the research community and raised questions about decision making at the most basic levels of life. Physarum's ability to make decisions is especially impressive given that its tubular network is constantly undergoing rapid reorganization, expanding and breaking down, with the complete absence of a center for organizing decisions - the nervous system. Researchers have found that the body weaves memories of food encounters directly into the architecture of the network body and uses stored information to make future decisions.
“It’s very interesting when the project developsbased on simple experimental observation. We observed the organism's migration and feeding process and found a distinct imprint of the food source on the structure of the thicker and thinner tubes of the network long after feeding. Given the highly dynamic reorganization of the P. polycephalum network, the persistence of this imprint has given rise to the idea that the network architecture itself may serve as a memory of the past. However, first we needed to explain the mechanism of memory imprint formation.”
Karen Alim, Head of the Biological Physics and Morphogenesis Group at MPIDS and Professor of Biological Network Theory at TUM
To find out what's going on, researcherscombined microscopic observations of tubular network adaptation with theoretical modeling. The encounter with food triggers the release of a chemical that travels from where the food was found throughout the body and softens the tubes in the body's network, causing the entire body to reorient its migration toward food.
As a result, past feeding events are embedded inhierarchy of tube diameters, in particular, in the arrangement of thick and thin tubes in the network. For the emollient chemical that is currently being transported, the thick tubes in the network act as highways in the transport network, allowing rapid transport throughout the body. Previous meetings, captured in network architecture, influence decisions about the future direction of migration.
The authors emphasize that the ability of Physarumforming memories is intriguing given the simplicity of this living network. It is remarkable that the body relies on such a simple mechanism and yet manages it in such a smooth manner. These results represent an important piece of the puzzle in understanding the behavior of this ancient organism and at the same time point to universal principles underlying the behavior.
Such a discovery could give impetus to the application of the results in the development of intelligent materials and the creation of soft robots that move in complex environments.
Read also:
The first accurate map of the world was created. What's wrong with everyone else?
Look at Hubble photos of planetary nebulae.
Physicists have created an analogue of a black hole and confirmed Hawking's theory. Where it leads?