Biological solutions to transport network design

Work done by Mark Fricker's group in Oxford in collaboration with colleagues in Cardiff has just been published in the Proceedings of The Royal Society B.

"Transport networks are vital components of multicellular organisms, distributing nutrients and removing waste products. .... Fungal networks demonstrate that indeterminate, decentralized systems can yield highly adaptive networks. Understanding how these relatively simple organisms have found effective transport networks through a process of natural selection may inform the design of man-made networks."

Full abstract and main paper (pdf)

This research has been conducted as part of the MMCOMNET project, funded by the European Commission under the Sixth Framework Programme