Of all science’s model organisms, none is as weird as Dictyostelium discoideum, a single-celled amoeba better known as slime mold. When they run out of food, millions coalesce into a single, slug-like creature that wanders in search of nutrients, then forms a mushroom-like stalk, scatters as spores and starts the cycle again.

In the rules governing the behavior of these creatures, researchers hope to find analogues for baffling biological mysteries, from the specialization of cells to how animals become altruistic.

“What I look for is principles that work on different scales,” said Princeton University biologist Ted Cox, who in an upcoming Nucleic Acids Research paper describes how cellular proteins find their DNA targets, a process he links to the slime mold’s foraging patterns. “The theoretical underpinning is exactly the same.”

Research on Dictyostelium took off in the 1950s, when work by Princeton biologist John Bonner led to the discovery of a chemical used by slime mold cells to signal, triggering their group-forming behavior. At the time, scientists assumed that a few specialized cells controlled the process. But a couple decades later, inspired by famed mathematician Alan Turing’s work on how simple rules produced complex structures, researchers showed that slime complexity resulted from the linked interactions of its cells, not some centralized regulator.

Their research stirred an ongoing scientific fascination with emergent properties and complexities. Since then, however, Dictyostelium has been overshadowed by Physarum polycephalum, another amoeba that exhibits amazing networking properties and is also known as a slime mold, though it’s no closer to the other slime mold than a horse is to a frog. (See sidebar.) To the chagrin of Dictyostelium researchers, the two creatures are sometimes confused with each other.

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