One of my friends here in Madison is an x-ray crystallographer doing entomological research; he sent me this request:
I have been looking for information regarding tropical bioluminescent slime mold (Myxomycetes). I want to find out who on the planet may have a sample I can grow in the lab or even a species name. I have found this phrase repeated, "some tropical slime molds are bioluminescent and glow in the dark," but for the past few days I'm stymied regarding what slime molds they may possibly be.He has searched the Mycological Society's ATCC without success, and I've written to my best microbiology/extremophile expert without a result, so I thought I'd just post the query on the blog and see if anyone has a suggestion...
Hopefully you'll get a better lead than this. But the science journalist Carl Zimmer (blog at The Loom) might have a lead for you - he has talked to scientists who work with all kinds organisms. I know I've read pieces by him about slime molds - I don't remember if they were bioluminescent or not.
ReplyDeleteHere's the most promising lead I could find.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.engessays.com/docs/278994.html
It mentions a list of bioluminescent phylum, including fungi.
The site requires payment to see the whole essay though :(.
Asked a mycologist buddy of mine, and he said you should talk to this guy:
ReplyDeletehttp://botit.botany.wisc.edu/toms_fungi/
Says my friend: "His name is Tom Valk, and he is an expert in environmental fungi. I had actually thought about cloning a gene from some of these glowing fungi, unfortunately, so little is know about them that it would be hard to do. There are lots of species that glow, so he needs to figure out what application he is looking at."
ReplyDeleteI have a crop of Omphalotus nidiformis which fruits (almost) every year in late March/early April.
ReplyDeletePhotos at:
http://faxmentis.org/html/science43.html
Of course, this is a fullsize mushroom, not a slime mould.
Interested?
Thank you all. Tonight I called my friend at U.W. He's going to review the comments and try to figure out which ones might be most promising.
ReplyDeleteI am always gobsmacked by the diversity of expertise among readers here.
I've seen some in the Congaree Swamp National Park after a thunderstorm. I collected some, but by the next evening, it was no longer glowing.
ReplyDeleteI fear I can't aid in locating specimens, but I can offer a story: when I was a boy, my family enjoyed camping in New Hampshire near Lake Ossipee. At night, one of my sisters spotted a bit of light on the ground and it turned out to be a piece of wood with either lichens or mold glowing inside it.
ReplyDeleteLike Daddyodoke's experience, it stopped glowing after a few days.
While not a tropical species, it shows that bioluminescent organisms can be found in temperate climates.
While not about slime molds, here is a link that discusses bioluminescence in molds.
ReplyDeleteI came across that link while reading up on Foxfire, which seems to explain the bioluminescent mold that my sister found that night.
What is nice about this, is that this is a local fungus that you can find near home and is probably a lot easier to take care of than a tropical species. Also, being native to the area, you won't have to worry about containment issues, either.
A little late in the year now, but I have a feeling I've got a new thing to look for next year when the season is right!
At the bottom of this article on National Geographic, there is contact information for a scientist who seems to specialize in bioluminescent fungi.
ReplyDeleteThe word is in from THE experts in the field: Dr. Steve Stephenson, the world's expert on slime molds and Dr. Dennis Desjardin, the expert in bioluminescent fungi.
ReplyDeleteBioluminescent slime molds do not exist.
There are a number of fungi that are bioluminescent, some that are common to North America. But no slime molds.
Back in the 1980's I visited a cavern in southern Georgia (USA)with a university caving club where a glowing material was known to occur in one of the sandy bottomed rooms deep in the cave. (A stream flowed through the room at least occasionally and likely carried organic debris from the surface.) The glow was barely detectable by human eyes, and could only be seen after lights had been extinguished for some time. The faintness was partly due to the fact that the tiny filaments from which the glow came were thinner than a human hair. What was interesting was that the glow was not continuous but increased and decreased at a regular rate, which we confirmed was not a trick of our eyes by counting off the beat, and found that we were all counting at the same frequency. After further observation, we realized that what we were actually seeing was a flow of the luminescence along the filament, back and forth in a regular pattern. These filaments were on the sandy floor, so we were able to lay there with our faces quite close to them. (Yes, we did bag up a sample, but it was somehow lost before we got back to the university.) Fast forward to the 1990s and I was watching downlink from a spacelab science experiment as part of my work. One of the videos was a magnified image of protoplasmic streaming in a slime mold. The rhythm and frequency of the forwards and backwards flow was identical to what I had observed all those years before in the Georgia cave.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. Thanks, anon.
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