Older Classification
Slime molds, as a group, are polyphyletic. They were originally represented by the subkingdom Gymnomycota in the Fungi kingdom and included the defunct phyla Myxomycota, Acrasiomycota and Labyrinthulomycota. Today, slime molds have been divided between several supergroups, none of which is included in the kingdom Fungi.
Slime molds can generally be divided into two main groups.
- A plasmodial slime mold is enclosed within a single membrane without walls and is one large cell. This "supercell" (a syncytium) is essentially a bag of cytoplasm containing thousands of individual nuclei. See heterokaryosis.
- By contrast, cellular slime molds spend most of their lives as individual unicellular protists, but when a chemical signal is secreted, they assemble into a cluster that acts as one organism.
Read more about this topic: Slime Mould, Taxonomy
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