Morphological Plasticity: Environmentally Driven Morphogenesis

This paper focuses on the environmental role in morphogenesis in dynamic morphologies (DM). We discuss the benefits of morphological plasticity (MP) and introduce our Environment-Phenotype Map (E-P Map) framework in order to investigate and classify the continual development in DMs and morphologically adaptive behaviour. We present our MP-capable system the Artificial Cytoskeleton (ArtCyto), housed within our DM the ‘Cellanimat’, with an E-P Map closely based on MP examples from cell physiology. We provide experimental results to demonstrate that with this single E-P Map a bifurcation in morphology can occur, caused only by a difference in the environment, mirroring evidence from physiological data of fibroblast cell chemotaxis and macrophage cell phagocytosis.