Multi-scale biophysical modeling of fungal colony growth

Multiscale BMX simulations of fungal colony growth reproduce experimentally observed traveling-wave profiles while resolving negative autotropism in 3D networks at far lower computational cost than full AMR hyphal mechanics.

• Why it matters: High-fidelity 3D hyphal models are too computationally expensive to plug into predictive ecosystem simulators, and macroscopic parameter degeneracies limit mechanistic interpretation.
• What they did: The authors couple discrete hyphal mechanics with an analytically tractable stochastic traveling-wave surrogate (sBARE), using demographic fluctuations at the advancing front to separate forward drift from effective diffusion.
• The result: Interior network density under replete conditions emerges as an invariant self-regulated by fusion, and sensitivity analysis shows expansion speed and network density depend on largely disjoint microscopic parameters.

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