Designed by Slime: "Intelligent" Transportation Systems

Overview

Objectives/Goals The objective of my experiment was to test whether the Physarum polycephalum, a slime mold, is capable of creating dendritic networks between food sources. . I hypothesized that the Physarum polycephalum could be used to help highway engineers design the most efficient transportation routes since the slime mold has the ability to create the shortest path between two points. Methods/Materials I prepared ten agar plates and placed twenty oats representing cities within the boundaries of Los Angeles County and Orange County using a printout of a map of the freeway system of the two counties. Once the agar plates were prepared, a piece of the slime mold was placed on the oat flake representing downtown Los Angeles. The movement of the Physarum polycephalum and the connections it made between the oats were observed and then compared to the map, which had been reduced to match the size of the petri dish. Results The Physarum polycephalum did create shorter paths between most of the cities. Overall the total distance of the Physarum polycephalum created network was 4.96 centimeters shorter than the total distance of the paths between the cities on the present freeway system. Conclusions/Discussion These results support my hypothesis that the Physarum polycephalum is not only capable of creating the shortest path between two food sources, but can also be used as a tool to help guide the design of freeway networks and other transportation systems. This will help civil engineers around the world to design more efficient transportation systems.

Competition history

• CSEF 2013 Microbiology (General) · Entry J1509

Resources

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