Slime Molds, especially Dictyostelium
10 Apr 2009 17:40
Like almost everyone else who comes to this from a mathematical background, I am particularly interested in Dictyostelium. Depending on one's point of view, this is either a single-celled amoebae which can cooperate to form structures ensuring better dispersal when food gets scarce; or a differentiated multicellular organism where forming a new organism doesn't require merging two gametes, but many, without a notion of sex. Or it's an excitable medium.
See also: Developmental Biology; Excitable Media; Pattern Formation; Self-Organization
- Recommended:
- John Tyler Bonner
- The Cellular Slime Molds
- The Social Amoebae: The Biology of Cellular Slime Molds [Blurb, ch. 1. My mini-review]
- Owen M. Gilbert, David C. Queller and Joan E. Strassmann, "Discovery of a large clonal patch of a social amoeba: implications for social evolution", Molecular Ecology 18 (2009): 1273--1281 [Reprint]
- Satoshi Sawai, Peter A. Thomason and Edward C. Cox, "An autoregulatory circuit for long-range self-organization in Dictyostelium cell populations", Nature 433 (2005): 323--326
- To read:
- Richard H. Kessin, Dictyostelium: Evolution, Cell Biology, and the Development of Multicellularity [Blurb]
- Wouter-Jan Rappel, Alastair Nicol, Armand Sarkissian, Herbert Levine and William F. Loomis, "Self-Organized Vortex State in Two-Dimensional Dictyostelium Dynamics," patt-sol/9811001
