Scientists have discovered that a slime mold can invade a colony of bacterial cells similarly to how cancer cells invade healthy tissue. As reported in a new study, published Monday (March 28) in Current Biology, the invasive behavior of the slime mold, Fonticula alba, may hold clues as to how multicellular structures arose in fungi and animals.
F. alba, which has only ever been found in the environment one time (on some dog feces from Arkansas, back in the 1960s), drew little interest until a few years ago, when scientists from the University of Geneva became interested in its unique position on the evolutionary tree. While most previously characterized slime molds, such as Dictyostelium spp., are relatives of animals and plants, F. alba is instead more closely related to fungi than other slime molds.
“Fungi and animals are very closely related on the evolutionary tree,” Chris Toret, a microbiologist at ...
