Movie: Life Cycles: Lessons from the Cellular Slime Mold, Dictyostelium discoideum

About the Movie

This is a fourteen-minute movie on the life cycle of the cellular slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum and the experiments of John Tyler Bonner, who has devoted over 50 years to the study of the this organism, establishing it as a model organism central to examining some of the major questions in developmental biology. With time-lapse photography, including original footage from Bonner’s own work, the life cycle of Dictyostelium is explained as well as Bonner’s discovery that cells can move up a gradient of a chemical substance, and that the attractant, in the case of Dictyostelium, is cAMP. This discovery was, and still is, one of the clearest demonstrations that we have of chemotaxis. Always with clever design and relatively simple equipment, Dr. Bonner’s experiments have inspired generations of students to be imaginative in their own studies.

Sample Slides from Movie