Regensburg 2019 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 17: Statistical physics of biological systems I (joint session BP/DY)

BP 17.7: Vortrag

Mittwoch, 3. April 2019, 16:45–17:00, H4

Dynamical states of a living network — •Philipp Fleig, Mirna Kramar, Michael Wilczek, and Karen Alim — Max-Planck-Institut für Dynamik und Selbstorganisation, Göttingen, Germany

Understanding the emergence of behaviour in living systems from underlying physical mechanisms is a major goal of biophysics. Even very simple, non-neural organisms like the slime mould Physarum polycephalum show remarkably complex behaviour including growth, adaptation of the network morphology and foraging for food - despite only being a single, giant, network-shaped cell.

Behavioural dynamics, here, emerge directly from living matter, namely the coordinated contractions of the cell’s tubular shaped acto-myosin cortex undergoing rhythmic contraction every 100 seconds. We decompose this spatiotemporal dynamics into principal components and identify a reduced set of characteristic large-scale contraction patterns spanning the network. Based on this dictionary of patterns we are able to determine the typical sequence of the network’s response patterns to a controlled stimulus, mimicking a natural response scenario. We also find spontaneously occurring breaking of coherent contraction dynamics into decoherent patterns over short time-scales. Finally, we note a power law distribution of the relative amplitudes of the principal components. This may be key in explaining the observed dynamical features from the underlying biomechanics. Our findings connect behaviour with characteristic states of living matter.