Berlin 2024 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 20: Poster IIIa

BP 20.36: Poster

Wednesday, March 20, 2024, 11:00–14:30, Poster B

Dynamical Network Remodeling of Physarum polycephalum — •Mathieu Le Verge-Serandour and Karen Alim — School of Natural Sciences, Technical University of Munich, Germany

Remodeling of a network is one of the hallmarks of biological flow networks, ensuring their optimal morphology. Due to limited building costs, the removal of vessels allows these networks to reallocate matter to minimize dissipation while ensuring maximum coverage,. Physarum polycephalum is a unicellular slime mold organized as a two-dimensional tubular network that evolves drastically over a few hours, evacuating a large zone of a few millimeters squared. Unfavorable competing parallel veins are first removed to form a tree-like structure, where veins prune sequentially until complete evacuation of the zone. Analyzing time-lapses of the slime mold, we find an exponential decrease in the number of tubes reproduced by our model based on the network hierarchy. We explore the dynamics of simulated networks by looking at the influence of the global outlets, tube length distribution, and network hierarchy. Our approach to flow networks may be generalized to pruning flow networks, as during embryonic development, stroke events, or information encoding.

Keywords: Physarum polycephalum; Flow network; Coarsening