Related papers: Routing Physarum with electrical flow/current

While the collective motion of active particles has been studied extensively, effective strategies to navigate particle swarms without external guidance remain elusive. We introduce a method to control the trajectories of two-dimensional…

Control of the cytoskeleton and mechanical contacts with the extracellular environment are essential component of motility in eukaryotic cells. In the absence of signals, cells continuously rebuild the cytoskeleton and periodically extend…

Acellular slime mould Physarum polycephalum is a monstrously large single cell visible by an unaided eye. It shows sophisticated behavioural traits in foraging for nutrients and developing an optimal transport network of protoplasmic tubes…

The phloem vascular system facilitates transport of energy-rich sugar and signaling molecules in plants, thus permitting long range communication within the organism and growth of non-photosynthesizing organs such as roots and fruits. The…

Swimming organisms in their natural habitat navigate through a wide array of geometries and chemical environments. Interaction with the boundaries is ubiquitous and can significantly modify the swimming characteristics of the organism as…

Limbless crawling is ubiquitous in biology, from cells to organisms. We develop and analyze a model for the dynamics of one-dimensional elastic crawlers, subject to active stress and deformation-dependent friction with the substrate. We…

While computational capacity limits of the universe and carbon-based life have been estimated, a stricter bound for aneural organisms has not been established. Physarum polycephalum, a unicellular, multinucleated amoeba, is capable of…

Plants create sugar in the mesophyll cells of their leaves by photosynthesis. This sugar, mostly sucrose, has to be loaded via the bundle sheath into the phloem vascular system (the sieve elements), where it is distributed to growing parts…

Animals use past experiences to adapt future behavior. To enable this rapid learning, vertebrates and invertebrates have evolved analogous neural structures like the vertebrate cerebellum or insect mushroom body. A defining feature of these…

We implement Kolmogorov-Uspensky machine on a plasmodium of true slime mold {\em Physarum polycephalum}. We provide experimental findings on realization of the machine instructions, illustrate basic operations, and elements of programming.

Many active systems are capable of forming intriguing patterns at scales significantly larger than the size of their individual constituents. Cyanobacteria are one of the most ancient and important phyla of organisms that has allowed the…

Micro-robots for, e.g., biomedical applications, need to be equipped with motility strategies that enable them to navigate through complex environments. Inspired by biological microorganisms we recreate motility patterns such as…

In a cellular medium, the plasmic membrane is a place of interactions between the cell and its direct external environment. A classic model describes it as a fluid mosaic. The fluid phase of the membrane allows a lateral degree of freedom…

The cambium is a meristematic tissue in plant stems. Here, cell divisions occur that are required for radial growth of plant stems. Daughters of cell divisions within the cambium differentiate into woody xylem cells towards the inside of…

Flexible information routing fundamentally underlies the function of many biological and artificial networks. Yet, how such systems may specifically communicate and dynamically route information is not well understood. Here we identify a…

Motivated by a recent prediction to engineer the dispersion relation of a waveguide constructed from atomic components [arXiv:2104.08121], we explore the possibility to create directional transport in an open, collective quantum system. The…

For a wide range of modern soft functional materials the selective transport of sub-nanometer-sized molecules (`penetrants') through a stimuli-responsive polymeric membrane is key to the desired function. In this study, we investigate the…

We numerically examine a bidisperse system of active and passive particles coupled to a resource substrate. The active particles deplete the resource at a fixed rate and move toward regions with higher resources, while all of the particles…

Locally broken symmetries are used across fields to transport matter, particles and information in preferential directions. Beyond local mechanisms, spatially distributed nonlinearities in crystalline media have enabled non-reciprocal…

In a prototypical mode of single-cell migration, retrograde cytoskeletal flow is mechanically coupled to the environment, propels the cell, and is sustained by an anterograde cytosolic flow of disassembled cytoskeletal components.…