Each species of slime mold has its own specific chemical messenger, which are collectively referred to as acrasins.
One of the earliest acrasins to be identified was cyclic AMP, found in the species Dictyostelium discoideum by Brian Shaffer,[2] which exhibits a complex swirling-pulsating spiral pattern when forming a pseudoplasmodium.[3]
The term acrasin was descriptively named after Acrasia from Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene,[4] who seduced men against their will and then transformed them into beasts. Acrasia is itself a play on the Greek akrasia that describes loss of free will.
Brian Shaffer was the first to purify acrasin, now known to be cyclic AMP, in 1954, using methanol. Glorin, the acrasin of P. violaceum, can be purified by inhibiting the acrasin-degrading enzyme acrasinase with alcohol, extracting with alcohol and separating with column chromatography.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia English article Acrasin, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license ("CC BY-SA 3.0"); additional terms may apply (view authors). Content is available under CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
®Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wiki Foundation, Inc. Wiki English (DUHOCTRUNGQUOC.VN) is an independent company and has no affiliation with Wiki Foundation.