Emergence of synchronized growth oscillations in filamentous fungi

• Published in: Journal of the Royal Society interface 2024-10, Vol.21 (219), p.20240574
• Main Authors: Prakash, Praneet, Jiang, Xue, Richards, Luke, Schofield, Zoe, Schäfer, Patrick, Polin, Marco, Soyer, Orkun S, Asally, Munehiro
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Basidiomycota - growth & development; Basidiomycota - physiology; Fungi - growth & development; Fungi - physiology; Life Sciences–Physics interface; Models, Biological; Spores, Fungal - growth & development; Spores, Fungal - physiology
• ISSN: 1742-5689; 1742-5662; 1742-5662
• DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2024.0574

Many species of soil fungi grow in the form of branched networks that enable long-range communication and mass flow of nutrient. These networks play important roles in the soil ecosystem as a major decomposer of organic materials. While there have been investigations on the branching of the fungal networks, their long-term growth dynamics in space and time is still not very well understood. In this study, we monitor the spatio-temporal growth dynamics of the plant-promoting filamentous fungus for several days in a controlled environment within a microfluidic chamber. We find that cells display synchronized growth oscillations with the onset of sporulation and at a period of 3 h. Quantifying this experimental synchronization of oscillatory dynamics, we show that the synchronization can be recapitulated by the nearest neighbour Kuramoto model with a millimetre-scale cell-cell coupling. The microfluidic set-up presented in this work may aid the future characterization of the molecular mechanisms of the cell-cell communication, which could lead to biophysical approaches for controlling fungi growth and reproductive sporulation in soil and plant health management.