A generalised spatial branching process with ancestral branching to model the growth of a filamentous fungus

Abstract

In this work, we introduce a spatial branching process to model the growth of the mycelial network of a filamentous fungus. In this model, each filament is described by the position of its tip, the trajectory of which is solution to a stochastic differential equation with a drift term which depends on all the other trajectories. Each filament can branch either at its tip or along its length, that is to say at some past position of its tip, at some time- and space-dependent rates. It can stop growing at some rate which also depends on the positions of the other tips. We first construct the measure-valued process corresponding to this dynamics, then we study its large population limit and we characterise the limiting process as the weak solution to a system of partial differential equations.