Aruna Naorem, a molecular geneticist at Delhi University, studies the proteins responsible for setting off the development phase in amoeba.
Picture a racetrack shaped like a maze. The contestants arrive from all over the world, shielded carefully from the public. They’re fierce, ravenous. Once they enter the maze, they have only one goal – to reach the pool of food at the end. There are not many rules; in fact, the organisers encourage the racers to indulge in some genetic tweaking and chemical doping if that’s what it takes.
On your mark, get set, GO!
As much as this sounds like the plot of a sci-fi movie, I’m just talking about the Dicty World Races, a microbial Pac-Man of sorts. The maze or the racetrack is made from silicone and the contestants are a type of soil amoeba named Dictyostelium discoideumand dubbed Dicty, or ‘slime mould’. The ‘food’ is a chemical or a chemoattractant that is present throughout the maze but in rising concentrations from the start to the finish line.
The first Dicty Races took place in 2014. Teams of scientists from around the world groom their line of Dicty cells by engineering their genes to make them win. This could be by making them better chemical sniffers or more flexible while navigating or less sticky to the maze surface. The winner is the line of cells to navigate most accurately and reach the pool of chemical at the end the quickest.