You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey.

Today's cool fact of the day is that slime mold has found a way to feed its next generation.

And that's because researchers have discovered that social amoeba secrete proteins that

help preserve what you can call a starter kit for its offspring.

This is a kind of slime mold from soil called, I'm going to try this, Dictio Stellum Discoldium.

And it eats bacteria.

And some wild forms of that species basically farm the bacteria and pass them along in

spore cases that give the next generation of amoeba the beginnings of a local patch

of prey.

And tests found that the trick to keeping the parental immune system from killing the

starter crop of bacteria is a surge of proteins called lectins.

And lectins create a different way for those amoeba to treat bacteria as actual symbionts

inside the cells instead of as prey or as an infection according to molecular cell

biologists at the Baylor College of Medicine and Houston.

Now the reason this is interesting is that lectins are a protein you may have heard of.

You heard about them in the bulletproof diet.

You heard about them in the plant paradox from a recent interview with Dr. Stephen Gundry.

And lectins are signaling molecules that have all sorts of interesting effects throughout

the body and throughout all of Mother Nature.

And this is a new and interesting use of them.

And these findings just as a general biology sort of thing marked another chapter in a

story that's been upending decades of what we thought we knew about amoebas and bacteria.

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