ERC Starting Grant · 2024
Plants as a window on emergent memory and computation in dynamical distributed multicellular systems
Plants are multicellular organisms with no brain, yet they respond to external stimuli by coordinating their cells into strategic growth-driven movement, termed tropisms. Specifically, local sensory information is encoded, processed and propagated across the tissue via stochastic transport of growth hormones, and the plant responds by growing. Notably, information-processing and growth (actuation) are merged; thus plants are a unique case of morphological computation. However, they have yet to be studied from this perspective. Doing so could offer groundbreaking insights into distributed computation in physical and biological systems. This research aims to provide such insights, by…
From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.