Follow My Lead

Life is simple if you’re a Dictyostelium slime mould. Most of the time, you spend your days as a free-living single cell in the soil. But when things get tough and food starts running low, you and all your friends send out signals enabling you to come together to form a tiny ‘slug’ that can move further afield in search of a better life. Certain genetic changes (mutations) prevent this slug from forming, but even these mutant slime mould cells can still work together by playing a miniature game of ‘follow my leader’. This video shows individual cells making contact and forming a travelling band that moves together in the same direction in response to chemical signals. This collective cell migration might also underpin many processes in development and disease in more complex animals, such as forming organs and limbs, wound healing, and enabling cancers to spread around the body.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

Writer

Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Video from work by Masayuki Hayakawa and colleagues
• Laboratory for Physical Biology, RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research, Kobe, Japan
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, April 2020