Mycelium
Background
Mycelium (plural mycelia) is the vegetative part of a fungus, consisting of a mass of branching, thread-like hyphae. The mass of hyphae is sometimes called shiro, especially within the fairy ring fungi. Fungal colonies composed of mycelia are found in soil and on or in many other substrates. Typically a single spore germinates into a monokaryotic mycelium which cannot reproduce sexually; when two compatible monokaryotic mycelia join and form a dikaryotic mycelium, that mycelium may form fruiting bodies such as mushrooms. A mycelium may be minute, forming a colony that is too small to see, or it may be extensive.
It is through the mycelium that a fungus absorbs nutrients from its environment. It does this in a two stage process. Firstly the hyphae secrete enzymes onto the food source, which breaks down polymers into monomers. These monomers are then absorbed into the mycelium by facilitated diffusion and active transport.
Mycelium is vital in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems for its role in the decomposition of plant material. It contributes to the organic fraction of soil and its growth releases carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. The mycelium of mycorrhizal fungi increases the efficiency of water and nutrient absorption of most plants and confers resistance to some plant pathogens. Mycelium is an important food source for many soil invertebrates.
Application
There exist various branching algorithms for data structures, mapping, networking etc. These algorithms also exist readily in nature, that we use within programming and computer sciences to emulate a particular behavior. An example would be the recursive repeating patterns within fractals that exist in electricity or even romanesco broccoli, which help us in solving/simulating recursive behavior in computer sciences. Not all naturally occurring patterns can be modeled as an algorithm. One of which is the branching mechanism and mapping seen in a Mycelium portion of a fungus. What makes this mechanism unique is that it is one of the fastest methods in finding a particular point of interest without any ’senses’. Normally if you are located somewhere within a plane and would like to get to a particular point of interest you may use your sight sense or sense of smell to get to that particular point of interest. However the Mycelium finds it’s point of interest (nutrients) by sporadically branching off. The Mycelia lacks any of the senses and requires the nutrients to grow and feed itself. Once nutrients have been found it utilizes them to feed off and branch off even more sporadically to discover more nutrients.
This pattern and/or branching algorithm unfortunately to this day has not been mapped. However I have found a method of emulating this behavior not as an algorithm but as a graphical method. Lets take a picture as an example, where the bright portions represent “nutrients”. The brighter the pixel the higher the concentration of nutrients and the darker the less. We shal start at a particular point and randomly branch off until one of the nodes has found a bright spot, upon locating the bright spot more branching will be directed in that area and the resulting branching will be used to find further brighter spots in the image. Thus behaving like a Mycelium fungus.
Example