There is a rare and mysterious slime mold.
Scientists have found that the single-celled species of Fonticula alba joins together to form an invader whole that tears through a colony at a specific stage of its life cycle. The collective behaves like an aggressive cancer.
This discovery could help us understand how multicellular organisms emerged from the simple, single-celled origins of all life on Earth.
There is a rare and peculiar type of mold. It was isolated from a sample of dog feces in Kansas in 1960 and cultured in a laboratory.
Like many other slime molds, F. alba is a sort of catch-all group for anything that can't be neatly categorized as animal, vegetable, or fungus.
When it comes time to spread, these single cells aggregate, coming together in a multicellular form to grow volcano-like fruiting bodies.
It is also different from other slime molds in that it is related to fungi.
The team of researchers led by Christopher Toret of the University of Geneva wanted to learn more about the life cycle of the organisms they were studying. Klebsiella pneumoniae, a common fecal bacterium, was identified as the optimal co-culture for F. alba back in 1979.
They introduced the mold at different stages of the life cycle of K. pneumoniae. The researchers found that F. alba aggregated into a multicellular state as K. pneumoniae ran out of food.
Transient cell columns, similar to the hyphae we know from fungi, formed when the slime mold came together and moved into the colony. The filaments searched for new sources of food in the agar plate.
The cells of the mold came together to form the filaments, with a single leader cell at the tip. The leader cell gives information to the follower cells.
The follower cells were no longer able to seek out new food sources when the leader cell was disrupted. When one of the follower cells was disrupted, the disarray was not observed. This suggested that the cells were involved in the multicellular state.
The researchers said that this suggests a previously unconsidered origin for hyphae.
The researchers wrote in their paper that they suggest a hypothesis where hyphae could have had a direct aggregative origin.
The last common ancestor of fungi and F. alba may have assembled amoeboid cells into head-to-tail arborized collectives.
Cancer states use leader-and-follower dynamics for invasion, suggesting that different kinds of cells can display similar behaviors for different reasons. The team said that F. alba could be a powerful model for understanding the emergence of multicellularity as a general concept.
Current Biology published the research.
H/T: The scientist.
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