Slime Mold Aggregation
When food becomes scarce, slime mold cells begin secreting cyclic AMP, which diffuses through the environment.
There is no central controller directing which cells become stalk versus spore - yet the aggregate behaves as a coordinated multicellular organism.
When food becomes scarce, slime mold cells begin secreting cyclic AMP, which diffuses through the environment. Nearby cells detect this signal and respond by moving toward higher concentrations and secreting the signal themselves, amplifying it. Through this simple decentralized signaling, tens of thousands of individual cells aggregate into a single multicellular structure that can migrate toward favorable conditions.
Business Application of Slime Mold Aggregation
Demonstrates how coordinated collective behavior can emerge from purely local interactions without central planning - a model for understanding distributed organizational architectures.