The Third Mode of Life – The Magic of Slime Molds

Networks are ubiquitous in modern society ranging from road, rail and utilities infrastructure to the internet, World Wide Web and social media. What makes a network useful is more challenging to define – typically there is benefit in rapid and efficient transfer of material or information across the network, but the network also needs to be resilient to damage or faults without substantially increasing the costs. We are studying biological organisms that grow as interconnected networks to try to infer how implementation of growth rules at a local scale can lead to emergence of robust and efficient adaptive networks on a large scale. Surprisingly, simple slime molds and fungal networks are capable of building networks with comparable properties to real-world infrastructure networks, but in the absence of any centralized control.

Professor Mark Fricker

Professor Mark Fricker started as an undergraduate reading Botany at Pembroke in 1981, followed by a PhD in Stirling on stomatal physiology with Colin Willmer in 1984, a post-doc in Edinburgh with Tony Trewavas on calcium signalling, before returning to Pembroke as a Fellow of Pembroke in 1989. He is currently an active researcher in the Plant Sciences Department.