Altruism and social cheating in the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum

Joan E. Strassmann (), Yong Zhu and David C. Queller
Additional contact information
Joan E. Strassmann: Rice University
Yong Zhu: Rice University
David C. Queller: Rice University

Nature, 2000, vol. 408, issue 6815, 965-967

Abstract: Abstract The social amoeba, Dictyostelium discoideum, is widely used as a simple model organism for multicellular development1,2, but its multicellular fruiting stage is really a society. Most of the time, D. discoideum lives as haploid, free-living, amoeboid cells that divide asexually. When starved, 104–105 of these cells aggregate into a slug. The anterior 20% of the slug altruistically differentiates into a non-viable stalk, supporting the remaining cells, most of which become viable spores3,4,5. If aggregating cells come from multiple clones, there should be selection for clones to exploit other clones by contributing less than their proportional share to the sterile stalk. Here we use microsatellite markers to show that different clones collected from a field population readily mix to form chimaeras. Half of the chimaeric mixtures show a clear cheater and victim. Thus, unlike the clonal and highly cooperative development of most multicellular organisms, the development of D. discoideum is partly competitive, with conflicts of interests among cells. These conflicts complicate the use of D. discoideum as a model for some aspects of development, but they make it highly attractive as a model system for social evolution.

Date: 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/35050087 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:408:y:2000:i:6815:d:10.1038_35050087

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/35050087

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().