Regensburg 2022 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 12: Poster 2
BP 12.5: Poster
Tuesday, September 6, 2022, 17:30–19:30, P4
Unravelling the collective behaviour of protrusions for directed migration — •Lucas Tröger1 and Karen Alim1,2 — 1Physics Department and CPA, Technische Universität München — 2Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen
Living systems are often challenged to coordinate collective behaviour of individual entities across large spatial scales. The morphology of amoeboid cells, for example, arises due to the coordination of randomly forming protrusions that facilitates the cell's directed migration. The slime mold Physarum polycephalum grows as a single giant cell of network-like shape, spanning orders of magnitude in size ranging from 500 micrometers to tens of centimeters. Due to the large extent, chemotaxis and morphogenesis of the entire cell require a mechanism for coordination among competing protrusions. P. polycephalum is renowned for its organism-wide cytoplasmic fluid flows spanning the fluid-filled tubular network in a peristaltic wave. These strong and large-scale flows make this organism an ideal model to investigate the role of fluid flows in coordinating the collective behaviour of competing protrusions during the morphological changes in chemotaxis. We perform experiments of chemotacting P. polycephalum specimen of varying sizes and quantify the dynamics of individual protrusions in addition to the chemotactic performance of the entire specimen. We correlate growing and retracting protrusions over time to identify the mechanism of communication. The project will teach us how fluid flows control the collective behaviour of protrusions during directed migration.