I’ve been looking for a while for a suitable microorganism that might make the time-telling mechanism of a living timepiece. I have a kind of old fashioned but biological pocket watch in mind. I’ve just tested this fungus and it’s perfect! The large fungal colony here is over two months old and it clearly shows evidence of some form of biological clock at work. Not unlike the rings that we might find when a tree is cut down but the fungal rings develop over a much shorter time period. All I need to do now is calibrate the cycle.
Nice. Do you know if those are daily rings? I’m only counting ~25 or so of them. Temperature cycles perhaps? Light/dark cycles? Or merely successive rounds of cell division, with each round taking a day or two?
Thanks Patrik. The fungus was grown in the dark so I don’t think that it’s responding to light/dark.
I’ve no idea what is making the patterns!