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Plasmodium stage of Physarum polycephalum behaves as a distributed dynamical pattern formation mechanism who's foraging and migration is influenced by local stimuli from a wide range of attractants and repellents. Complex protoplasmic tube…
Intercellular signaling has an important role in organism development, but not all communication occurs using the same mechanism. Here, we analyze the energy efficiency of intercellular signaling by two canonical mechanisms: diffusion of…
Physarum polycephalum is a single-celled, multi-nucleated slime mold whose body constitutes a network of veins. As it explores its environment, it adapts and optimizes its network to external stimuli. It has been shown to exhibit complex…
Electrical signals play the primary role in rapid communication among organs, tissues and cells in biosystems. We have analyzed and discussed three phenomena of electrical communication in biosystems, including direction-changing movement…
Inside every living cell is the cytoplasm: a fluid mixture of thousands of different macromolecules, predominantly proteins. This mixture is where most of the biochemistry occurs that enables living cells to function, and it is perhaps the…
In biological systems, molecular-scale forces and motions are pivotal for enabling processes like motility, shape change, and replication. These forces and motions are organized, amplified, and transmitted across macroscopic scales by…
Network-forming organisms, like fungi and slime molds, dynamically reorganize their networks during foraging. The resulting re-routing of resource flows within the organism's network can significantly impact local ecosystems. In current…
Slime mould \emph{Physarum polycephalum} is a large single cell capable for distributed sensing, concurrent information processing, parallel computation and decentralised actuation. The ease of culturing and experimenting with Physarum…
To maintain homeostasis, living cells process information with networks of interacting molecules. Traditional models for cellular information processing have focused on networks of chemical reactions between molecules. Here, we describe how…
Slime mould of Physarum polycephalum is a large cell exhibiting rich spatial non-linear electrical characteristics. We exploit the electrical properties of the slime mould to implement logic gates using a flexible hardware platform designed…
Active cellular transport is a fundamental mechanism for protein and vesicle delivery, cell cycle and molecular degradation. Viruses can hijack the transport system and use it to reach the nucleus. Most transport processes consist of…
We study molecular dynamics within populations of diffusively coupled cells under the assumption of fast diffusive exchange. As a technical tool, we propose conditions on boundedness and ultimate boundedness for systems with a singular…
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…
Particles diffusing near interfaces face anisotropic resistance to motion due to hydrodynamic interactions. While this has been extensively studied near \textit{hard} interfaces since the works of Lorentz and Brenner, our understanding of…
Plasmodium of Physarum polycephalum is a single cell visible by unaided eye, which spans sources of nutrients with its protoplasmic network. In a very simple experimental setup we recorded electric potential of the propagating plasmodium.…
Understanding the phase behaviour of pheromones and other messaging molecules remains a significant and largely unexplored challenge, even though it plays a central role in chemical communication. Here, we present all-atom molecular…
Plasmodium of Physarum polycephalum is a large single cell visible by unaided eye. It shows sophisticated behavioural traits in foraging for nutrients and developing an optimal transport network of protoplasmic tubes spanning sources of…
Coordination of cytoplasmic flows on large scales in space and time are at the root of many cellular processes, including growth, migration or division. These flows are driven by organized contractions of the actomyosin cortex. In order to…
P. polycephalum may be considered as a spatially represented parallel unconventional computing substrate, but how can this `computer' be programmed? In this paper we examine and catalogue individual low-level mechanisms which may be used to…
In this work we study and expand a model describing the dynamics of a unicellular slime mold, Physarum Polycephalum (PP), which was proposed to simulate the ability of PP to find the shortest path connecting two food sources in a maze. The…