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Slime Mold

Fungi

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Physarum polycephalum is an acellular slime mold, or myxomycete, technically an amoeba, with diverse cellular forms and a broad geographic distribution. Its acellular plasmodial stage is a bright yellow, macroscopic, multinucleate mass shaped as a network of interlaced tubes, and that stage, together with its preference for damp shady habitats, originally led to the organism being mistaken for a fungus. It is commonly cultivated and used as a model organism in research into motility, cellular differentiation, chemotaxis, cellular compatibility and the cell cycle.

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