ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2016
Direct transfer of learned behaviour via cell fusion in non-neural organisms.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed, 82 citations in OpenAlex.
- Towards a Research Programme Aiming at Causes and Consequences of Reticulate Evolution.Biology · 2025Review
- On the prospects of basal cognition research becoming fully evolutionary: promising avenues and cautionary notes.History and philosophy of the life sciences · 2025Article
- Novel image-analytic approach reveals new insights in fine-tuning of slime mould network adaptation.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Perspectives on Principles of Cellular Behavior from the Biophysics of Protists.Integrative and comparative biology · 2023Review
- Bioelectric networks: the cognitive glue enabling evolutionary scaling from physiology to mind.Animal cognition · 2023Review
- Thoughts from the forest floor: a review of cognition in the slime mould Physarum polycephalum.Animal cognition · 2023Review
- Receptor-Independent Therapies for Forensic Detainees with Schizophrenia-Dementia Comorbidity.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Article
- Behavioural changes in slime moulds over time.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Learning in the Single-Cell OrganismInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2023Article
- The brain is not mental! coupling neuronal and immune cellular processing in human organisms.Frontiers in integrative neuroscience · 2023Article
- Relation between learning process and morphology of transport tube network in plasmodium ofFrontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2023Article
- Competency in Navigating Arbitrary Spaces as an Invariant for Analyzing Cognition in Diverse Embodiments.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Cell fusion through slime mould network dynamics.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Virus-Induced Membrane Fusion in Neurodegenerative Disorders.Frontiers in cellular and infection microbiology · 2022Review
- Non-Random Genome Editing and Natural Cellular Engineering in Cognition-Based Evolution.Cells · 2021Review
- Adaptive behaviour and learning in slime moulds: the role of oscillations.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Substrate and cell fusion influence on slime mold network dynamics.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Behaviorist approaches to investigating memory and learning: A primer for synthetic biology and bioengineering.Communicative & integrative biology · 2021Review
- Stress signalling in acellular slime moulds and its detection by conspecifics.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Ecological memory and relocation decisions in fungal mycelial networks: responses to quantity and location of new resources.The ISME journal · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cell fusion is a fundamental phenomenon observed in all eukaryotes. Cells can exchange resources such as molecules or organelles during fusion. In this paper, we ask whether a cell can also transfer an adaptive response to a fusion partner. We addressed this question in the unicellular slime mould Physarum polycephalum, in which cell-cell fusion is extremely common. Slime moulds are capable of habituation, a simple form of learning, when repeatedly exposed to an innocuous repellent, despite lacking neurons and comprising only a single cell. In this paper, we present a set of experiments demonstrating that slime moulds habituated to a repellent can transfer this adaptive response by cell fusion to individuals that have never encountered the repellent. In addition, we show that a slime mould resulting from the fusion of a minority of habituated slime moulds and a majority of unhabituated ones still shows an adaptive response to the repellent. Finally, we further reveal that fusion must last a certain time to ensure an effective transfer of the behavioural adaptation between slime moulds. Our results provide strong experimental evidence that slime moulds exhibit transfer of learned behaviour during cell fusion and raise the possibility that similar phenomena may occur in other cell-cell fusion systems.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.