The South Adjusts--Downward

Raper, Arthur T.; Reid, Ira De A.

doi:10.2307/271167

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

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“…Consistent with this view is the capacity of cells to reprogram' their development when their local environment is perturbed. For instance, if one part of a slug is experimentally removed, cell fate decision are reassessed (Raper, 1940). Similarly, once extracted from their social context by dissolving a slug into fresh medium, cells de-differentiate and resume unicellular growth (Soll & Waddell, 1975) in a way that is highly robust to mutations in developmental genes (Nichols et al, 2020).…”

Section: Cell Cycle Phasementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Eventually, most cells in the population belong to one multicellular aggregate, or mound, composed of tens of thousands individual cells. Later, mounds elongate into slugs, chemotactic and phototactic worm-like structures with the ability to sense and move towards bright and dry environments, like the soil surface (Raper, 1940;Bonner et al, 1950). Here, slugs produce fruiting bodies that can be picked up by insects and dispersed (Smith et al, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Social Conflicts in <em>Dictyostelium discoideum</em> : A Matter of Scales

Forget¹,

Adiba²,

Monte³

2020

Preprint

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The ’social amoeba’ Dictyostelium discoideum, where aggregation of genet- ically heterogeneous cells produces functional collective structures, epitomizes social conflicts associated with multicellular organization. ’Cheater’ populations that have a higher chance – quantified by a positive spore bias – of surviving to the next generation are selectively advantaged. Their spread is thus expected to undermine collective functions over evolutionary times. In this review, we discuss the two main approaches adopted to conceptualize social conflicts in Dictyostelium discoideum: describing spore bias as a property of cell popula- tions (strains), or as a result of individual cell choices during the developmental process. These two points of view are often held equivalent and used inter- changeably. While the population-level view allows for more direct evolutionary inference, however, the cell-level interpretation reveals that such evolutionary predictions may be modified if developmental mechanisms, such as dependence on the environment and intrinsic unpredictability of cell fate choices, are taken into account. We conclude by proposing a set of open questions that in our opinion lie at the core of a multi-scale description of aggregative life cycles, where the formulation of predictive evolutionary models would include cell-level mechanisms responsible for spore bias alongside population-level descriptors of multicellular organization.

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Section: Cell Cycle Phasementioning

confidence: 99%