Complexity Explorer Santa Few Institute

Lichen are an excellent model organism, showing how cooperation between two taxonomically separated organisms can allow them to live in environments that would be impossible on their own. In a past project, I built a model of the biochemical signaling processes in slime molds, and I think it would be interesting to build a model of the exchanges of nutrients between the plant(s), fungi(s), and sometimes bacteria that make up a lichen.

To do so I would build a kind of Boolean decision-making tree, which defines the interactions of the species based on a variety of inputs. We know that different species in a symbiotic relationship can withhold nutrients, so modeling some of these behaviors with game theory-like techniques could illustrate the complex ways these ‘individuals’ interact in the collective system. Not only would this provide some insight into how these interactions lead to a unique ‘organism,’ but it could serve as a simple model for the mycorrhizal network interactions in forests, where fungi trade plants nutrients for sugars at a much larger scale, or even the interaction between hosts and bacteria in the gut.