Flow Modes Provide a Quantification of Physarum Network Peristalsis
22 Pages Posted: 14 Nov 2022
Abstract
Physarum polycephalum is a foraging, network-forming organism known for its ability to make complex decisions and maintain memory of past stimuli without use of a complex nervous system. Self-organized peristaltic flows within the network transport nutrients throughout the organism and initiate locomotion and morphological changes. A key step in understanding P. polycephalum’s ability to change behavior is therefore forming descriptors of this peristaltic flow. Here, we develop a dynamic network-based method for describing organism-wide patterns of tube contractions from videos of P. polycephalum. Our tool provides robust readouts of the diversity of global modes of tube contraction that could occur within a given network, based on its geometry and topology, and sensitively identifies when global peristaltic patterns emerge and dissipate.
Keywords: Slime Mold, Physarum polycephalum, Behavior, Biological Network, Peristalsis, Physical Modeling, Spectral Analysis, Stokes Equations, Singular Value Decomposition, Graph Laplacian, Linear Map, Image Analysis
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