Continuous emergence of phototaxis in Dictyostelium discoideum
Damien Genettais, Charles Bernard, Félix Geoffroy, Clément Nizak, Sandrine Adiba, Michael Klymkowsky, Dave Mangindaan, Dave Mangindaan
TL;DR
This study shows that phototaxis in the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum emerges as a group behavior when cells come together in multicellular slugs.
Contribution
The study demonstrates that phototaxis is an emergent property of multicellularity, not present in individual cells.
Findings
Single cells of Dictyostelium discoideum are not phototactic, but slugs are.
Phototaxis efficiency increases with the number of cells in a slug.
Cell-cell interactions and self-organization are essential for phototaxis to emerge.
Abstract
The evolutionary transition from uni- to multicellularity is associated with new properties resulting from collective cell behavior. The social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum alternating between individual cells and multicellular forms of varying size provides a powerful biological system to characterize such emergent properties. Multicellular forms coined slugs have long been described as chemotactic towards cAMP, and also as phototactic. While chemotaxis is also well-documented at the single-cell level, which explains slug chemotaxis, we asked whether slug phototaxis is an emergent property of multicellularity. For this, we developed an automated microscopy setup to quantify and compare the migration trajectories of single cells and slugs moving in the dark or illuminated with lateral light. We find that single cells, either extracted from phototactic slugs or taken prior to…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSlime Mold and Myxomycetes Research · Biocrusts and Microbial Ecology · Micro and Nano Robotics