Our Y-maze with food on one side and nothing on the other. Guess where they went!
— Written by Amanda Putti & Milica Milosevic —
Well we made it! We’re at the final week of the BYB Fellowship! We faced many challenges throughout this project and had to pivot in order to get results, but we are happy where it ended.
To give updates on our progress, let’s first start where we left off 3 weeks ago. Using a blue light, we took one picture of the slime mold every minute over 24 hours. This allowed us to string the pictures together and make some great time lapse videos! After this, we were able to analyze the videos using a program in Python and create a special kind of video which converts yellow slime branches into lines of directed growth – skeletonized growth video. This was really helpful for understanding how the slime mold grows, explores new areas, and creates a network. But we also think that there’s more to it, and that behavioral analysis opens a lot of questions in the field of biophysics and is a project for itself.
We were very excited to get this imaging. However, we then made the decision to keep the rest of our experiments in the dark and in that manner reduce the amount of imaging done. Slime mold prefers to grow in the dark, and we wanted to make sure light wasn’t inhibiting growth in our experiments.
This means we were more focused on quantifying decision making rather than behavior. We set up a series of three types of experiments and ran many, many tests. (The order of explaining them isn’t coordinated with the chronological order of our work, but makes more sense this way!)
1. Solving Mazes
We wanted to test the ability of slime molds to choose a path that leads them to food, so we set up the easiest of mazes – a Y maze where there was food on one side of the Y and nothing on the other side of the Y (see photo above). Slime molds showed us that they have no intentions of staying hungry and that they’re doing just fine when it comes to finding the food source.
Then we wanted to make things more complicated for them, so we constructed a specific T maze – one side of the letter T was longer and had a food source, and the other was a lot shorter and had an object as a mechanical stimulus (we’ll get more into the mechanical stimulation in a bit). The idea was to check if they can see the difference between the food and something that isn’t food and if they are gonna choose the shorter path towards the no-food region. So, we tried to confuse them, but failed at it – they knew where the food was and grew in that direction almost every time!
— Written by Luka Caric, Elsa Fedrigolli & Tom DesRosiers —
Prepare yourselves for another round of mushroom-tastic journey as we delve into the captivating world of electrical potentials in mushrooms. Join us as we unfold the shocking truths, sprinkle in some mushroom humor, and discover the electrifying mysteries hidden within these fantastic fungi!
In our quest for mushroom marvels (as recounted in our introductory blog post), our team, “The Fungi Fanatics,” welcomed a “shocking” new member – Luka, an electrical engineer from the University of Belgrade. With his vast knowledge and electrifying chess skills (pun intended!), Luka was the perfect addition to tackle our electrical challenges and amplify our experiments to the next level!
Our first hurdle came in the form of a pesky amplifier problem. But fear not, for Luka was here to save the day with an ingenious solution. With each spark of brilliance, he conjured up new ways to amplify those elusive electrical signals from our mushroom friends, making us wonder if he had a secret stash of “electric mushrooms” up his sleeve!
Luka’s creativity knew no bounds! He cooked up a “mushroom square wave” that slowly charged and discharged through a capacitor, mimicking the mystical behavior of real mushrooms’ electrical potentials. It was a fungi-tastic idea that became our electrifying benchmark – our guiding light through the mushroom labyrinth.
Oh, the wonders of mushrooms – magical, but as fleeting as a lightning bolt! No matter how much we coaxed or begged, these fungi had their own schedule. Just like the fleeting sparks of an electrical storm, their fruiting bodies lasted for a mere 2-3 days. They left us yearning for more recordings, teasing us like elusive little lightning bugs!
In our pursuit of electrifying knowledge, we couldn’t resist an encounter with slime mold – the “mushroom-protist hybrid”, which also created a crossover between our project and the slime mold project of the fellowship! However, whenever we placed electrodes into the slime and into the mold – the mold would just move away from our electrode. How rude of them!
We are all familiar with the Pinocchio story, right? A wooden boy whose nose would grow every time he lied. What if I told you that, with the right equipment, you could feel like Pinocchio in a just few minutes?
All you need is a massager (>50 Hz frequency and >1mm amplitude), either a blindfold or willpower to keep your eyes closed, and someone to help you conduct the whole thing (aka the experimentator).
Firstly, you will have to contract your arm muscle so that the experimentator can find your biceps tendon.
Close your eyes (or put on the blinfold) and position your arms, as shown in the illustration above.
It’s time for the experimentator to turn on the massager and position it on the biceps tendon of your contracted arm!
After aproximatelly one minute of the stimulation you should start feeling as if your arm is extending forward and taking the nose with it so that it feels like it’s getting longer. The more you stimulate, the more vivid the illusion becomes!
And that’s it – in just a few minutes, you can understand how Pinocchio felt like while lying. Unlike with Pinocchio, however, this illusion can occur without you having to lie to anyone’s face!
