Praneet Prakash, Xue Jiang , Luke Richards, Zoe Schofield, Patrick Schafer Marco Polin, Orkun S. Soyer & Munehiro Asally

Many species of soil fungi grow in the form of branched networks that enable long-range communication and mass flow of nutrient. While there have been investigations on the branching of the fungal networks, their long-term growth dynamics in space and time is still not very well understood. In this study, we monitor the spatio-temporal growth dynamics of the plant-promoting filamentous fungus Serendipita indica for several days in a controlled environment within a microfluidic chamber. We find that S. indica cells display synchronised growth oscillations with the onset of sporulation and at a period of 3 hours. Quantifying this experimental synchronisation of oscillatory dynamics, we show that the synchronisation can be recapitulated by the nearest neighbour Kuramoto model with a millimetre-scale cell-cell coupling.

Royal Society Interface. October 2024