Its young leaves are edible, and the large gourdlike woody fruit contains a tasty mucilaginous pulp from which a refreshing drink can be made.
Some genera may be amoeboid during part of the life cycle; others may include a palmella stage, a condition in which the cells occur in a mucilaginous mass but continue to metabolize.
The possible cause of the large evil-smelling, mucilaginous mats that had formed in the Adriatic Sea every summer since 1989 was revealed in April.
Each slender leaf is covered with several hundred tiny, bristlelike tentacles, each of which is topped with a reddish knob (in reality a gland) that exudes a clear, sticky, mucilaginous liquid.
The sporangia are equipped with a sticky mucilaginous ring that adheres to vegetation when wetted by the propelling fluids.
Pulp still clings to the coffee seed, however, as a thin mucilaginous layer.
When moistened, they move through the soil and leave a trail of sticky mucilaginous sheath material behind that glues soil particles in place.
The eggs are surrounded by a mucilaginous mass (the egg pod) that dries in a cylindrical shape.
Snipefish eggs are enveloped in a mucilaginous substance from which the larvae are freed as development proceeds.
During the preparation of cellulose, raw plant material is treated with hot alkali; this treatment removes most of the lignin, the hemicelluloses, and the mucilaginous components.
By contrast, psyllium and P. ovata have been useful in medical science; they produce mucilaginous seeds, which have been used, for example, in laxative preparations known as psyllium, ispaghul, or spogel seeds.
