Berlin 2018 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 10: Postersession II

BP 10.53: Poster

Montag, 12. März 2018, 17:30–19:30, Poster C

Examining Anticipation in Physarum polycephalum — •Nico Schramma, Felix Bäuerle, and Karen Alim — Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organisation, Göttingen, Germany

Memory and anticipation are complex mechanisms that have developed in higher species to predict and adapt to changing conditions. Even the unicellular slime mold Physarum polycephalum has been shown to anticipate periodic events. As a plasmodial vascular network, P. polycephalum changes its morphology in order to forage, and pumps cytoplasma through the organism using oscillatory contractions of tubes organized in a peristaltic wave. Saigusa et. al. showed that lateral restricted foraging P. polycephalum networks decrease their speed when stimulated periodically by unfavorable conditions. Interestingly, even after omission of the stimulus P. polycephalum still anticipates the withhold stimulus. However, the mechanism of this sophisticated behavior is not yet understood and cannot be extracted from their low resolution data. Here we show that periodic blue light stimulation of P. polycephalum networks entraines frequency modulations of tube contractions, which persist after the omission of further stimuli. Kymograph analysis of microscope pictures shows that the entrained frequency changes overall with a period similar to the periodic stimulation, with overall frequency minima coinciding with the blue light stimulus. Our analysis therefore suggests that the anticipation behaviour of P. polycephalum is a function of the entrainment of frequency modulations.