Growth of large plasmodia of the myxomycete Physarum polycephalum.

A method has been developed for growing Physarum polycephalum plasmodia that are 8 to 10 times larger than those obtained in the petri dish cultures used by Nygaard, Guttes, and Rusch. In the large-scale procedure, plasmodia were grown in metal trays on a membrane supported by filter paper on stainless-steel screen. Plasmodia were started from a ring of inoculum to allow inward and outward migration and were incubated on a rocker so that nutrient medium would flow back and forth, wetting the undersurface of the plasmodium. Rocker and petri dish cultures had similar growth characteristics: (i) the interphase time between mitoses I and II and between II and III was about 8 hr; (ii) ribonucleic acid and protein increased essentially logarithmically throughout the cell cycle; and (iii) deoxyribonucleic acid increased only during early interphase and it doubled in approximately 3 hr after each mitosis. Rocker cultures were not as nearly synchronous as petri dish cultures and had a range in metaphase time (at mitosis III) within individual plasmodia of 15 to 45 min, as compared with 5 to 10 min in petri dish cultures.