Remarkable problem-solving ability of unicellular amoeboid organism and its mechanism

" These computing capabilities are considered to originate from autonomous oscillatory dynamics of the plasmodium in which the volume of each part oscillates with a period of approximately 1min [12]. When placed in a multi-lane stellate chip shown in figure 1a, the plasmodium grows its pseudopod-like branches by repeating the supply and withdrawal of its intracellular resource (protoplasm) at each oscillation cycle (figure 1b). Although the time series of the growth movement of the branch appears to be noisy, it contains temporal correlation comparable with the oscillation period that fluctuates in a chaotic manner [13,14]. Furthermore, the oscillatory movements of distant branches are spatially correlated, as they exhibit phase synchronizations that produce various spatio-temporal patterns of travelling phase waves [15,16]." {Credits 1}

" According to the results shown in our previous work [18], it was conjectured that the spatial and temporal correlations in the oscillatory dynamics of the plasmodium are essential for enhancing its computational capability." {Credits 1}

{Credits 1} 🎪 Zhu, L., Kim, S. J., Hara, M., & Aono, M. (2018). Remarkable problem-solving ability of unicellular amoeboid organism and its mechanism. Royal Society open science, 5(12), 180396. © 2018 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.