Cell Lineage Conflicts in the Cellular Slime Mold, Dictyostelium discoideum

大多数多细胞生物体，如人类，都是由单个细胞形成的。相比之下，社会阿米巴通过从一个小区域聚集单个细胞来形成一个多细胞实体。这种差异使研究人员能够评估一个系统中的有机体内的遗传冲突，该系统可能被证明是一个理想的社会进化模型系统。研究人员将描述自然栖息地中细胞的遗传变异，然后研究当这些细胞聚集在一起形成多细胞个体时如何相互作用。他们将评估一些细胞系控制其他细胞系的频率，迫使它们成为不育茎的一部分，而不是可育的孢子。不同的细胞系将在实验室中进行组合，并使用可变DNA微卫星定位进行评估。细胞如何相互作用是涉及许多生物学基本问题的重要问题。例如，逃脱其他细胞控制并继续分裂的细胞就是癌症的特征。程序性细胞死亡是一种重要的机制，可以将生物体中的细胞排除在错误的位置或具有某种缺陷。当社会阿米巴形成子实体时，一些细胞死亡，而另一些细胞存活。了解一些细胞逃脱程序性细胞死亡过程，并可能迫使其他细胞死亡的过程，对于理解癌症和人类发育疾病的机制具有潜在的相关性。

Most multicellular organisms, like humans, form from a single cell. By contrast, the social amoeba forms a multicellular body by aggregating individual cells from a small area. This difference allows the investigators to evaluate genetic conflicts within an organism in a system that may prove to be an ideal model system for social evolution. The investigators will characterize the genetic variation in cells in a natural habitat, and will then investigate how these cells interact when they come together in a multicellular individuals. They will evaluate how often some cell lines dominate over other cell lines, forcing them to be part of the sterile stalk instead of the fertile spore. Different cell lineages will be combined in the laboratory and evaluated using variable DNAmicrosatellite loci.How cells interact with each other is an important question that bears on many fundamental problems in biology. For example, cells that escape the control of other cells and continue to divide characterize cancer. Programmed cell death is an important mechanism for ridding an organism of cells in the wrong place or that have certain kinds of defects. When the social amoeba forms a fruiting body, some cells die while others live. Understanding the process whereby some cells escape the process of programmed cell death, and perhaps force other cells to die is of potential relevance to mechanisms for understanding cancer, and human developmental diseases.