Slime Mould

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

See also more on Slimemold or Jenseits der Schleimpilzkunst - Au-delà de l'art myxomycète

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

Resources

 * dictybase where you can find genomes, protocols and other resources
 * A Simple Method of Growing the Plasmodial Slime Mold written for Physarum polycephalum