The Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self Organization and Technical University of Munich researchers have identified the basis for developing memories in what's identified as Physarum polycephalum slime mold, despite the absence of its nervous system.
According to a Phys.org report, having a memory of previous events allows humans to take and make smarter decisions about the future.
Essentially, the ability to stock and recover information provides an organism a clear benefit when looking for food or evading hazardous environments, and has traditionally been associated with organisms with nervous system.
A study that Mirna Kramar and Professor Karen Alim authored challenges this outlook by revealing the unexpected abilities of an extremely dynamic, single-celled organism to store and recover information about its environs.
The 'Physarum Polycephalum'
The Physarum polycephalum slime mold has been puzzling scientists for several decades already. Prevailing at the crossroads between plants, fungi and animal kingdoms, this unique organism offers insight into the eukaryotes' early evolutionary history.
Its body is a gigantic single cell that's composed of interconnected tubes, forming complicated networks. This one amoeba-like cell may stretch many centimeters, or even meters, featuring as the earth's largest cell in the Guinness Book of World Records.
The slime mold's remarkable and prominent abilities to solve multifaceted problems like searching for shortest path via a maze gained it the characteristic 'intelligent,' fascinated the research community and sparked questions on decision-making on life's most basic levels.
Physarum's decision-making ability is particularly captivating given that its tubular network is continuously undergoing speedy recognition, growth and disintegration of its tubes, while totally lacking an organizing center.
In addition, the scientists discovered that the organism is weaving memories of food encounters straight into the network-like body's architecture and utilizes the stocked information when making decisions in the future.
Decisions Guided by Memories
According to Biological Physics and Morphogenesis group head Karen Alim from the MPIDS, it is quite exciting when a particular project is developing from one simple experimental observation.
Alim, also a Theory of Biological Networks professor from TUM added, they followed the migration, as well as the organisms' feeding process, and observed a unique imprint of a food source on an arrangement of the network's thinner and thicker tubes long after feeding.
Given the Physarum's extremely dynamic recognition of networks, the prevalence of this imprint ignited the notion that the network architect itself could function as the past's memory. Nevertheless, the researchers initially needed to explain further the mechanism behind the formation of the imprint.
To know what exactly is going on, the study investigators integrated microscopic findings of the tubular network's adaption with theoretical forming.
Essentially, an encounter with food stimulates the emission of a chemical that travels from the area where food was located throughout the organism and has the tubes softened in the network, making the entire organism reorient its journey towards food.
The slow softening, Krama, the study's first author said, is where the current imprints of past food sources are coming into play and where information is stored and recovered.
Krama added, past feeding occurrences are implanted in the order of tube diameters, particularly in the thick and thin tube's arrangement in the network.
For the softening chemical now transported, the thick tubes in the network are functioning as highways in traffic networks, allowing speedy transport through the entire organism.
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