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Dictyostelium Discoideum

Algae and Protists

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Dictyostelium discoideum, commonly called the social amoeba or cellular slime mold, is a soil-dwelling amoeba found in forest litter and topsoil worldwide, feeding on bacteria as a solitary single-celled organism under normal conditions. When food becomes scarce, thousands of individual amoebae aggregate into a coordinated multicellular slug that can crawl toward light and heat before forming a stalked fruiting body, a striking transition between unicellular and multicellular life that has made it a widely used model organism in developmental biology and cell signaling research.

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