Emergent behaviour and short term adaptation in a unicellular organism (Parameciucm) : observation and modelling

Paramecium is a genus of popular unicellular ciliated protozoa that you can findeasily in the pond near your office. The relationships between the behaviour and electrophysiological property of the organism has been intensively studied for more than 50 years. Based on the physiological data, we constructed a Paramecium model to study the adaptive behaviours induced by the mechanical interaction with environments. In this seminar, we report a new type of behaviour of the organism in the dead-end glass capillary tube and discuss its relationship with the variation in the behavioural pattern of our model. We also introduce a further recent experimental study and its modelling.

[1]Kunita,I. et al. (2014) Frontiers in Microbiology 5, doi=10.3389/fmicb.2014.0027

[2]Kuroda,S. et al. (2017) “Physical ethology of unicellular organisms” in “Brain Evolution by Design”, ed. by Shigeno,S. et al. pp.3-23

[3]Ohki,K. (2016) Master thesis, (Graduate School of Life Science, Hokkaido University) (in japanese)