Novel taxis of the Physarum plasmodium and a taxis-based simulation of Physarum swarm

The plasmodium of Physarum polycephalum is a unicellular and multinuclear giant amoeba. We investigated the behavior of the plasmodium in magnetic field and found that the organism has magnetotaxis. Based on this new finding, we further studied how the taxis benefit the survival of the plasmodium using a simple swarm model. The result from the model implies that the magnetotaxis promotes prompt swarming of the plasmodia and at the same time facilitates the effective exploration of the space on which the cells crawl.