The Growing Liberality Observed in Primary Animal and Plant Cultures is Common to the Social Amoeba

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that the increase in cellular liberality observed in animal and plant cell cultures is also present in social amoebae, suggesting a universal response to culture environments across different biological kingdoms.

Contribution

It provides the first measurement of liberality in social amoebae, extending the concept across multiple kingdoms and highlighting its potential universality.

Findings

Liberality increases in social amoebae in liquid culture

Quantitative measures of liberality applied to amoebae

Supports universality of culture-induced cellular behaviors

Abstract

Tissue culture environment liberates cells from ordinary laws of multi-cellular organisms. This liberation enables cells several behaviors, such as proliferation, dedifferentiation, acquisition of pluripotency, immortalization, and reprogramming. Recently, the quantitative value of cellular dedifferentiation and differentiation was defined as liberality, which is measurable as Shannon entropy of numerical transcriptome data and Lempel-Zip complexity of nucleotide sequence transcriptome data. The increasing liberality induced by the culture environment had first been observed in animal cells and had reconfirmed in plant cells. The phenomena may be common across the kingdom, also in a social amoeba. We measured the liberality of the social amoeba which disaggregated from multicellular aggregates and transferred into a liquid medium.