Skip to main content

Modelling mycelium growth

 

Why material science?

Since material names are used to define periods of civilisations of the past (Stone Age, Bronze Age, etc ...), material science is considered, in my opinion, one of the species-defining endeavours. Civilizations that mastered smelting iron ended up victorious. All of a sudden, enemies had to deal with stronger swords and implantable shields. The same applies today, countries that managed to master silicon chip manufacturing ended up economically victorious.


With the advent of biotechnology, largely with the help of artificial intelligence tools such as AlphaFold, there could be a promise of a new class of materials that are grown instead of manufactured. Bio-composite materials offer an alternative solution to create materials inspired by nature and can returned to it at the end of their lifespan. Such materials will tremendously accelerate reaching our sustainability goals.

Mycelium Composites

One such material is mycelium, which is considered nature's solution to the recycling issue. Mycelium is the fine network of filament of tiny threads called hypha usually found underneath the soil surface. It is considered part of fungi, the other visible part is of course the mushroom body (Figure 1). When used with organic matter placed in a mold, mycelium acts as a binder holding the organic matter (substrate) tightly to form a rather strong material with impressive mechanical properties (figure 1). Moreover, you can tune these properties to suit your desired application, from leather to thermal insulation to packaging material. One such company doing this is BiodesignSA.



Figure 1

Back to Turing

In order for a material to be taken seriously by engineers and designers, they need to be able to predict its behaviour. Biology is notoriously complicated, but computation efforts and AI can help us find solutions. In a previous post, I showed how Turing's reaction-diffusion model can help predict communication between cells for morphogenesis to occur. Here, I show how can that same model be used to predict mycelium growth in a substrate. As a teaser, here's how you could use the simulations to imagine how mycelium growth will look like given substrate positioning.

via GIPHY


If you saw the word "Bio", yes that is what it was supposed to be

Model setting up

The model was inspired by a paper called " The origins of Spatial Heterogeneity in vegetative mycelia: a reaction-diffusion model" by C.M. Regalado and others. It hypothesises an interaction of activators and inhibitors similar to how Turing imagined in his paper, with the addition of another crucial component, the substrate. A system of PDE system is developed that hopefully shows the interaction between mycelium hypha and the substrate.


If you want to understand reaction-diffusion models in general, refer to my previous post here. I used VisualPDE to simulate the model and it is very interesting! Below, you can try this model by clicking anywhere. By clicking, you're increasing the substrate concentration in that specific area (i.e. increasing variable s in the model). What is being viewed below is the activator, which is an indication of mycelium growth. I recommend pressing the restart button before adding the substrate. Have fun!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Butlerian Jihad: The crusade against AI and hidden tech

Image 1: Mdjourney generated picture using the prompt: "cartoon of human soldiers fighting a small robot. it shows the defeated robot in the middle and human soldiers aiming their rifles at the robot" "We must negate the machines-that-think. Humans must set their own guidelines. This is not something machines can do. Reasoning depends upon programming, not on hardware, and we are the ultimate program! Our Jihad is a "dump program." We dump the things which destroy us as humans!" ' ― Minister-companion of the Jihad. [6] That quote will be recognizable if you have read Dune by Frank Herbert . I found it suitable to bring the novel up during the extreme mixture of excitement and fear among people given the recent advance in artificial intelligence. Even an open letter was signed by many extremely influential people to halt the progress of artificial intelligence research to avoid a situation like in the cartoon above in image 1 (which is ironically AI ...
Post a Comment
Read more

What does flattening the curve mean mathematically?

As of today, most countries are on lockdown; a strategy devised by governments to help slow down the spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19. Moreover, officials use the term flattening the curve to help the healthcare system cope with the expected large amount of patients, but what does that mean mathematically? I will go on an overview of how to construct a useful toy mathematical model to get a qualitative view of the dynamics of the virus. This is a typical SIR model appearing a lot lately in the media. I will go further to explain how to develop such a model and explain the power and limitations of such models. How to construct SIR models SIR stands for Susceptible, Infectious and Recovered (or Removed) agents. In our example, the agents are humans spreading the disease to each other. To simplify things, we model an agent as a node and the links between nodes represent social connections, as seen in the picture below: Figure 1: Modelling humans as nodes...
Post a Comment
Read more

Communication without noise

Communicating information is perhaps the highlight of the 21st century; the obvious example is the boom in internet and smartphone use in the last 20 years or so; everything is well connected and messages get sent within a fraction of a second. A less obvious example of communicating information is through reading information stored in physical object prone to damage. For example, a CD could be scratched slightly but still, all the relevant information can be recovered properly.  How did we arrive at such a resilient communication? Let's take communicating with your partner as  an example. Without sounding too much like a family consultant, the key here is to send your message as clearly as possible to avoid misunderstanding. Let's say you are an intelligent being who can formulate a proper and grammatically correct sentence, and you wanted to say "I want pizza". You could say the sentence face to face, and hopefully, your crave for pizza would be communicate...
Post a Comment
Read more