SlimeMania 2022 - A Group Sabbatical

After much anticipation, planning, and several weeks of careful tending to our newest slimy lab member, the Dey lab put its usual activities on hold and kicked off its first two-week sabbatical. Two weeks to devote ourselves to doing research on the enigmatic slime mould Physarum polycephalum - to observe how thousands of nuclei divide simultaneously, understand how one organism can seemingly do both open and closed mitosis, and to just be mesmerised by its pulsating movements.

Time-lapse of a microplasmodium sped up 25x.

The first week started off with just that! While each lab member had worked out their own set of experiments, tailored to their expertise and interests, each and every one of us was drawn in by our first time-lapses of a reticulate, rhythmically contracting blob, moving its cellular material through its veins at incredible speeds. Our new obsession maybe wasn’t very surprising, since budding and tumbling are about the most interesting things we can expect from the microbes we usually work on. 

Maximum intensity projection of a S. polycephalum microplasmodium stained for DNA (magenta) and beta-tubulin (cyan).

During the second week, the hunt for mitoses was on. We each went through pictures of a few hundred mini-blobs, trying to catch the elusive yet coveted event. Throwing every dye and antibody we could get our hands on on our slimy fellow, we acquired some truly stunning pictures:

Did we ever manage to catch some dividing nuclei? Stay tuned to find out!