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A petri dish of Dictyostelium.. When food (normally bacteria) is readily available dictyostelids behave as individual amoebae, which feed and divide normally. However, when the food supply is exhausted, they aggregate to form a multicellular assembly, called a pseudoplasmodium, grex, or slug (not to be confused with the gastropod mollusc called a slug).
Since absolute aggregation rates are difficult to measure, one often refers to the dimensionless stability ratio W, defined as = where k fast is the aggregation rate coefficient in the fast regime, and k the coefficient at the conditions of interest. The stability ratio is close to unity in the fast regime, increases in the slow regime, and ...
Most of its life, this haploid social amoeba undergoes a vegetative cycle, preying upon bacteria in the soil, and periodically dividing mitotically. When food is scarce, either the sexual cycle or the social cycle begins. Under the social cycle, amoebae aggregate in response to cAMP by the thousands, and form a motile slug, which moves towards ...
Clockwise from top right: Amoeba proteus, Actinophrys sol, Acanthamoeba sp., Nuclearia thermophila., Euglypha acanthophora, neutrophil ingesting bacteria. An amoeba (/ ə ˈ m iː b ə /; less commonly spelled ameba or amœba; pl.: amoebas (less commonly, amebas) or amoebae (amebae) / ə ˈ m iː b i /), [1] often called an amoeboid, is a type of cell or unicellular organism with the ability ...
In D. discoideum, the amoeba secretes the signal, cAMP, out of the cell, attracting other amoebae to migrate toward the source. Every amoeba moves toward a central amoeba, the one dispensing the greatest amount of cAMP secretions. The secretion of the cAMP is then exhibited by all amoebae and is a call for them to begin aggregation.
During the aggregation phase of their life cycle, Dictyostelium discoideum amoebae communicate with each other using traveling waves of cyclic AMP. [51] [52] [53] There is an amplification of cyclic AMP when they aggregate. [54] Pre-stalk cells move toward cyclic AMP, but pre-spore cells ignore the signal. [55]
In materials science, segregation is the enrichment of atoms, ions, or molecules at a microscopic region in a materials system. While the terms segregation and adsorption are essentially synonymous, in practice, segregation is often used to describe the partitioning of molecular constituents to defects from solid solutions, [1] whereas adsorption is generally used to describe such partitioning ...
When the amoebae are stressed, typically by a shortage of food, they form a grex. According to species and circumstances, details of the shape of the grex and how it may form will vary but typically the stressed amoebae first produce pheromones that stimulate the flock to vertically assemble in a column. When the column of aggregated cells ...