Cell Lineage Conflicts in the Social Amoeba, Dictyostelium Discoideum

大多数多细胞生物，比如人类，都是由一个单细胞形成的。相比之下，群居变形虫通过聚集小区域内的单个细胞形成多细胞体。这种差异使得研究人员能够更容易地评估生物体内部的基因冲突，而不是寻找新的突变。研究人员将描述自然环境中细胞的遗传变异特征，然后研究这些细胞在多细胞个体中聚集在一起时如何相互作用。他们将评估一些细胞系支配其他细胞系的频率，迫使它们死亡。细胞之间如何相互作用是一个关系到生物学许多基本问题的重要问题。例如，逃避其他细胞控制并继续分裂的细胞是癌症的特征。细胞程序性死亡是清除生物体中错误位置或有某种缺陷的细胞的重要机制。当群居变形虫形成子实体时，一些细胞死亡，而另一些细胞存活。了解一些细胞逃避程序性细胞死亡的过程，并可能迫使其他细胞死亡的过程，对理解癌症和人类发育性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 more easily than if they had to find new mutations. 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 individual. They will evaluate how often some cell lines dominate over other cell lines, forcing them to die.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.