Slime Mould

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Fuligo septica grown on nutrient agar plate

Slime Moulds have gotten a lot of attention of their ability to find optimised transport maps, but what are they???

What is a Slime Mould?

First they are NOT fungi - although for a long time, they were thought to be fungi because their life cycle resemble each other.

They are protists.

What is a protist?

A single cell eukaryote!
The problem of classification of protists is described in this video, which has movies of the diverse protista in motion under the microscope.
There are 3 groups of organisms commonly called slime moulds, but they do not share a common ancestor (a clade).

  1. Plasmodial slime molds = giant cells, single cells with thousands of nuclei fused flagellated cells
  2. Cellular slime molds = mostly found as separate single-celled amoeboid protists, but can swarm with chemical signals
  3. Labyrinthulomycota, called slime moulds, but are not related to 1 and 2


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