Imagine walking through a forest and rolling over a log. If it was banana-yellow and spread out on its underside, it would look like a sneeze.
The plasmodium form of Physarum polycephalum has many heads. It helps in the decay of organic matter to be recycled into the food web.
The strange little creature doesn't have a brain or a nervous system, it's just a single cell. The slime mold species has existed for a billion years in decaying habitats.
It's changed how we think about problem-solving.
The kind of revolution that occurred when people realized that plants could communicate with each other is what I believe it to be.
These little buggers can learn. It makes you feel a little bit more humble.
The P. polycephalum is in its natural environment.
P. polycephalum isn't uncommon. It can be found on a forest floor. Although we call it a "mold", it isn't actually a fungus. It's not an animal or plant, but a member of the protist kingdom, a sort of catchall group for anything that can't be neatly categorized in the other three kingdoms.
Each cell has a single nucleus. The plasmodium is a stage in the life cycle in which the organisms feed and grow.
In this form, fanning out in veins to look for food and explore its environment, it's still a single cell, but containing millions or even billions of nuclei swimming in the cytoplasmic fluid.
All organisms need to be able to make decisions about their environment. It needs to eat and be safe. The ideal conditions for its reproductive cycle need to be found. This is where our yellow friend gets interesting. The central nervous system of P. polycephalum is not present. It doesn't have anything special.
It can solve complex puzzles and remember novel substances. We used to think that only animals were capable of doing these tasks.
We're talking about cognitive functioning without a brain and without any neurons. The architecture of how information is dealt with is completely different to the way your brain works, according to a scientist.
We can start to see how this fundamentally different system might arrive at the same outcome if we provide it with the same problem-solving challenges that we have traditionally given to animals with brains. For a lot of these things, we've always thought it was necessary to have a higher information processing system, but that isn't always the case.
David Villa is a scientist with theCBI and theCNRS.
Science knows P. polycephalum. The "workhorse of cell biology" was once explained by physicist Hans-Gnther Dbereiner. It was easy to clone.
HeLa and P. polycephalum fell by the wayside as our genetic analysis toolkits evolved.
The little beastie was brought out of retirement by a Biologist. The title of his paper was "Maze-solving by an amoeboid organism".
Nakagaki and his team put a piece of plasmodium at one end of a maze and watched what would happen.
The results were stunningly good. The strange little acellular organisms was able to find the fastest route through the maze.
"That triggered a wave of research into what other kinds of more difficult scenarios we can test the mold with."
The researchers were surprised by how the mold performed. Some limitations were also revealed. It has been a voyage of revelation on how this simple creature can do tasks that have always been given to higher organisms.
The Tokyo subway was recreated by Nakagaki and P. polycephalum but the slime mold version was more robust to damage.
The protist was able to efficiently solve the traveling salesman problem, a mathematical task that programmers often use.
A team of researchers found that P. polycephalum can remember where it found food in the past. Dussutour and her colleagues found that blobs of slime mold could learn and remember things that they didn't like and communicate that information to other blobs of slime mold.
Dussutour said that they are complex because they always surprise you in an experiment.
In one instance, her team was testing a growth medium used for mammal cells to see if it worked.
It didn't like it. The structure was built so that it could go on the lead and escape. I'm like, "Oh my gosh, this thing!"
The network that P. polycephalum is a part of is a single-celled organisms. There is no centralized processing for the parts of the mold that operate on their own.
"I think the analogy would be in the brain," he added. It's the same for the brain and the mold.
Physarym polycephalum, "The blob" Network emergence
Oscillation waves#blob pic.twitter.com/kJUhH0w05a
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