A Survey on Physarum Polycephalum Intelligent Foraging Behaviour and Bio-Inspired Applications

Awad, Abeer; Lusseau, David; Coghill, George M.

doi:10.48550/arxiv.2103.00172

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 80 publications

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“…Second, despite being unicellular, acellular slime moulds can produce seemingly complex behaviours. Indeed, since the seminal contribution of Toshiyuki Nakagaki and colleagues more than 20 years ago [33], P. polycephalum has become an essential model organism for studying problem-solving in non-neural systems [32][33][34][35][36][37]. Past experiments have shown that acellular slime moulds can find the shortest path in a maze [33,38], build optimized networks to connect several food sources [34], anticipate events [39], learn to ignore irrelevant stimuli [40,41], encode memory in their environment [42] or in their morphology [43], interact with their congeners [21,44], optimize nutrient intake [28,45], make optimal decisions [27,29,46], etc.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Behavioural changes in slime moulds over time

Rolland

Pasquier

Paul

et al. 2023

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Changes in behaviour over the lifetime of single-cell organisms have primarily been investigated in response to environmental stressors. However, growing evidence suggests that unicellular organisms undergo behavioural changes throughout their lifetime independently of the external environment. Here we studied how behavioural performances across different tasks vary with age in the acellular slime mould Physarum polycephalum . We tested slime moulds aged from 1 week to 100 weeks. First, we showed that migration speed decreases with age in favourable and adverse environments. Second, we showed that decision making and learning abilities do not deteriorate with age. Third, we revealed that old slime moulds can recover temporarily their behavioural performances if they go throughout a dormant stage or if they fuse with a young congener. Last, we observed the response of slime mould facing a choice between cues released by clone mates of different age. We found that both old and young slime moulds are attracted preferentially toward cues left by young slime moulds. Although many studies have studied behaviour in unicellular organisms, few have taken the step of looking for changes in behaviour over the lifetime of individuals. This study extends our knowledge of the behavioural plasticity of single-celled organisms and establishes slime moulds as a promising model to investigate the effect of ageing on behaviour at the cellular level. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Collective behaviour through time’.

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