Latest Slime mold Stories

BioMed Central A 'cheater' mutation (chtB) in Dictyostelium discoideum, a free living slime mold able to co-operate as social organism when food is scarce, allows the cheater strain to exploit its social partner, finds a new study published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology. The mutation ensures that when mixed with 'normal' Dictyostelium more than the fair share of cheaters become spores, dispersing to a new environment, and avoiding dying as stalk cells....

Michael Harper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Nothing sounds dumber than “Slime Mold.” This might even be one of the more demeaning insult in sophomoric lexicon, as nothing sounds worse. Yet, for all its off-putting properties, (the slime, the mold) this little organism is fascinating to scientists and researchers, studying how it is able to grow, move and expand. The makeup of slime mold is relatively simple: A community of single-celled spores which have combined their...

Queen’s University professor Selim Akl has provided additional proof to the theory that nature computes. Dr. Akl (School of Computing) placed rolled oats on a map of Canada, covering the major urban areas. One urban area held the slime mold. The slime mold reached out for the food, creating thin tubes that eventually formed a network mirroring the Canadian highway system. “By showing species as low as slime mold can compute a network as complex as the Canadian highway system, we...

Experiments on "slime mold" explain why almost all multicellular organisms begin life as a single cell Any multicellular animal, from a blue whale to a human being, poses a special challenge for evolution. Most of the cells in its body will die without reproducing; only a privileged few will pass their genes to the next generation. How could the extreme degree of cooperation required by multicellular existence actually evolve? Why aren't all creatures unicellular individualists...

Cells at the tip of the slime mold's fruiting body organize into an epithelial layer and secrete proteins as do some animals cellsThe so-called cellular slime mold, a unicellular organism that may transition into a multicellular organism under stress, has just been found to have a tissue structure that was previously thought to exist only in more sophisticated animals. What's more, two proteins that are needed by the slime mold to form this structure are similar to those that perform the same...

A species of amoeba -- Dictyostelium discoideum -- has shown primitive farming behavior as it travels along, according to a new study. In results of the study, reported Jan. 19 in the journal Nature, evolutionary biologists Joan Strassmann and David Queller of Rice University show that the social amoebae (commonly known as slime molds) increase their odds of survival through a rudimentary form of agriculture. Research by lead author Debra Brock, a graduate at Rice, found that some amoebae...

Rice researchers find first to starve in slime mold thrive at others' expenseRice University evolutionary biologists reported in a paper published this week that the first cells to starve in a slime mold seem to have an advantage that not only helps them survive to reproduce, but also pushes those that keep on eating into sacrificing themselves for the common good.The paper by Rice graduate student Jennie Kuzdzal-Fick and her mentors, David Queller and Joan Strassmann, Rice's Harry C. and...

The efficient methods of a slime mold could inform human engineersWhat could human engineers possibly learn from the lowly slime mold? Reliable, cost-efficient network construction, apparently: a recent experiment suggests that Physarum polycephalum, a gelatinous fungus-like mold, might actually lead the way to improved technological systems, such as more robust computer and mobile communication networks.This revelation comes after a team of Japanese and British researchers observed that the...

Scientists at the University of the West of England are to design the first ever biological robot using mould.Researchers have received a Leverhulme Trust grant worth £228,000 to develop the amorphous non-silicon biological robot, plasmobot, using plasmodium, the vegetative stage of the slime mould Physarum polycephalum, a commonly occurring mould which lives in forests, gardens and most damp places in the UK.  The Leverhulme Trust funded research project aims to design the first...