Mycology

Bridge Mycelial transport networks of wood-decay fungi grow to topologies that approximate minimum spanning trees (MST) connecting nutrient sources while also maintaining fault-tolerant looping edges, exhibiting the same trade-off between cost and resilience that optimal network design theory predicts and that is observed in slime mold and mammalian vascular networks

Fields: Mycology, Mathematics, Network Science

Mycelial networks are self-organized physical graphs connecting resource nodes; their Steiner-tree-like minimization of total hyphal length subject to transport efficiency constraints produces topolog...