Slime and Cytoplasm

(Image from this award winning young scientist's web page.)

The first time I saw real live amoeba in my undergraduate biology lab class I was so excited that I went home and told my family... who reacted with blank stares and shrugs, but really... cells that move around by what looks like a magical oozing motion are cool.

How do they do that? It seems that they have the same kinds of (or similar) proteins that our muscle cells have. These protein filaments can contract and make the cytoplasm move. It looks a lot more complicated than that to me, but that has always been the draw of these "wee beasties"... they act in what seem to be very complex ways.

You can see the same kind of thing happen without a microscope if you look at a plasmodial slime mold. Plasmodial slime molds are also protists, like the amoeba, but they fuse together and make what is essentially a really big cell that has a lot of nuclei in it. You can watch these things flow around without a microscope... and I still find it so exciting to watch that I wanted to share it with you.

In this You Tube Video you can see a slime mold start out in one lump and spread out to cover nearby objects... flowing in a complex-looking, fascinating, and slightly disgusting way.

Links:

Actin and Myosin in Nonmuscle Cells (from an online cell biology text)

You and 30 of your closest friends could culture your own slime mold for less than $1.00 each.

An Abstract from a paper about the toxicity of ethanol and some other chemicals on Plasmodial Slime Molds.

Word of The Day

Cytoplasm: The jelly-like contents of a cell.