Context, positioning and objectives

   In the current context of world-wide climate change, understanding the different strategies of how organisms adapt to external changes, such as temperature increase, is of critical importance. Robustness to environmental variation is often related to phenotypic plasticity, the ability of the organism to modify its functioning or growth to adapt to the new conditions. Strikingly, some organisms are even able to adapt by drastically modifying their shape. This is the case of plants for instance or some filamentous structures such as slime molds. In the latter case, the organism adapts by modifying its complex fractal structure, thus deeply redefining its growth and transport processes. The project aims to understand this adaptive fractal remodeling process.