Articolo in rivista, 2015, ENG, 10.1007/s12539-015-0021-2

Magnetic Nanoparticles-Loaded Physarum polycephalum: Directed Growth and Particles Distribution

Dimonte, Alice; Cifarelli, Angelica; Berzina, Tatiana; Chiesi, Valentina; Ferro, Patrizia; Besagni, Tullo; Albertini, Franca; Adamatzky, Andrew; Erokhin, Victor

National Council of the Researches - Institute of Materials for Electronics and Magnetism (CNR-IMEM)Parma Italy; Department of Physics and Earth ScienceUniversity of Parma,Parma Italy; Unconventional Computing CentreUniversity of the West of England, Bristol UK

Slime mold Physarum polycephalum is a single cell visible by an unaided eye. The slime mold optimizes its network of protoplasmic tubes to minimize expose to repellents and maximize expose to attractants and to make efficient transportation of nutrients. These properties of P. polycephalum, together with simplicity of its handling and culturing, make it a priceless substrate for designing novel sensing, computing and actuating architectures in living amorphous biological substrate. We demonstrate that, by loading Physarum with magnetic particles and positioning it in a magnetic field, we can, in principle, impose analog control procedures to precisely route active growing zones of slime mold and shape topology of its protoplasmic networks.

Interdisciplinary Sciences: Computational Life Sciences 7 (4), pp. 373–381

Keywords

Unconventional computing, Physarum polycephalum, Network, Magnetic particles, Analog control

CNR authors

Chiesi Valentina, Cifarelli Angelica, Dimonte Alice, Albertini Franca, Besagni Tullo, Ferro Patrizia, Ivanova Tatiana, Erokhin Victor

CNR institutes

IMEM – Istituto dei materiali per l'elettronica ed il magnetismo