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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 28: Poster Session II

BP 28.31: Poster

Thursday, March 30, 2023, 18:00–20:00, P2/EG

A mechanical bottom-up approach of memory formation in Physarum polycephalum — •Mathieu Le Verge Serandour and Karen Alim — School of Natural Sciences, Technical University of Munich, Germany

Understanding the emergence of memory in artificial or living complex systems is a considerable challenge: its origin, possibly an interplay of physics, genetics, or signaling, has not yet been elucidated. Physarum polycephalum, a unicellular organized as a two-dimensional tubular network, exhibits hallmarks of memory formation: its adaptive morphology encodes the location of past stimuli. We propose to investigate memory formation with a bottom-up approach focusing on the physical mechanisms of vascular morphology adaptation. First, we study the mechanical properties of Physarum by microrheology. We measure the viscoelasticity of the network’s tubes and protrusions, and the change in stiffness or viscosity exposed to external stimuli, such as light or food. At the macroscopic scale, we study the dynamics of pruning of the network and its remodeling. We find an exponential decrease in the number of tubes reproduced by a toy model based on network hierarchy. These two complementary approaches will allow us to build a solid basis for establishing physical principles to characterize information encoding and memory emergence in Physarum polycephalum.