
The dictyostelids (Dictyostelia/Dictyostelea, ICZN, Dictyosteliomycetes, ICBN) or cellular slime molds are a group of slime molds or social amoebae.
The dictyostelids (Dictyostelia/Dictyostelea, ICZN, Dictyosteliomycetes, ICBN) or cellular slime molds are a group of slime molds or social amoebae.
==Multicellular behavior== thumb|left|A petri dish of Dictyostelium. When food (normally bacteria) is readily available dictyostelids behave as individual amoebae, which feed and divide normally. However, when the food supply is exhausted, they aggregate to form a multicellular assembly, called a pseudoplasmodium, grex, or slug (not to be confused with the gastropod mollusc called a slug). The grex has a definite anterior and posterior, responds to light and temperature gradients, and has the ability to migrate. Under the correct circumstances the grex matures forming a sorocarp (fruiting body) with a stalk supporting one or more sori (balls of spores). These spores are inactive cells protected by resistant cell walls, and become new amoebae once food is available.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).