Team:KIT-Kyoto/Project

Development of multi-level adjustment course by using morphological changes in slime mold

Slime mold has been living in various shapes its life cycle.This time we focused on the cellular slime mold.Dictyostelium is the representative of cellular slime mold.It has a very unique life cycle. It is an organism that has characteristics of both plants and animals.

Its life cycle can be divided into five stages.

1st stage spore
2nd stage myxameba
3rd stage aggregate
4th stage moving body
5th stage myxameba

Let’s take a look at these five stages in detail.

First, Dictyostelium survive until conditions for spore growth.(1st stage)Then the spores grow into myxameba, and undergo cell division and multiply while eating bacteria such as E. coli and yeast. In this case, amoeba cells can move about freely, behave like animal cells, so to speak, and has been living as a unicellular organism. (2nd stage)However by eliminating the food around, they go into starvation, some cells cell secrete a certain chemical substance, one making a collection of 100,000 cells gather around the cell toward.This assembly is not just a collection of cells, because it has most of the features of multicellular organisms,therefore they can be said multicellular organisms. (3rd stage)The aggregate forms moving body (slug structure) and moves to search the good place of the condition.(4th stage)Then they stop moving in some places ,creating a structure called a fruiting body. The structure of the fruiting body is sporangia containing a lot of spores on the cells called stalk. The stalk is made of dead cells which have a vacuole developed and secrete cellulose. (5th stage) Slime mold is repeats this lifecycle.

We have focused on these characteristic morphological changes of slime mold, and hope to develop a multi-step adjustment course by using morphological changes in the slime mold. As a concrete plan, at this stage, we produce a pigment to a slime mold and to change the color of the slime mold in each stage of the form change.The above-mentioned items are the current plans of team KIT-Kyoto. There were many points that did not become clear and conceptual things because we haven’t tried experiments yet. I showed tentative directionality.