#dictyostelium

[mosaicarray]

up at night thinking about slime mold altruism

[microbes-in-hats]

Dictyostelium discoideum Photo credit: Tyler Larsen/Washington University

[mycochaotix]

Slime mould! Super cool organisms with super cool life cycles! This is a life cycle diagram for cellular slime mould, Dictyostelium discoideum. Starvation is a main trigger of the amoebae form of rhe organism leading to ‘slug’ forms that transform into a fruiting body thats a sporangium structure atop a basal disc and thin stalk! The amoeba form comes from the fruiting bodies spore germination!🧠🤯

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#protozoa #dictyostelium #dictyosteliumdiscoideum

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[bpod-bpod]

Cross-cell Traffic

Visualising and analysing in live cells how one of the least-well understood members of the family of lipid molecules called PIPs regulates trafficking across cell membranes

Read the published research paper here

Edvard Munch, painter of the acclaimed image The Scream was born on this day (12th December) in 1863

Adapted video from work by James H. Vines and colleagues

School of Biosciences, University of Sheffield, Firth Court Western Bank, Sheffield, UK

Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Journal of Cell Biology, June 2023

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[bpod-bpod]

Follow My Lead

Life is simple if you’re a Dictyostelium slime mould. Most of the time, you spend your days as a free-living single cell in the soil. But when things get tough and food starts running low, you and all your friends send out signals enabling you to come together to form a tiny ‘slug’ that can move further afield in search of a better life. Certain genetic changes (mutations) prevent this slug from forming, but even these mutant slime mould cells can still work together by playing a miniature game of ‘follow my leader’. This video shows individual cells making contact and forming a travelling band that moves together in the same direction in response to chemical signals. This collective cell migration might also underpin many processes in development and disease in more complex animals, such as forming organs and limbs, wound healing, and enabling cancers to spread around the body.

Written by Kat Arney

Video from work by Masayuki Hayakawa and colleagues

Laboratory for Physical Biology, RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research, Kobe, Japan

Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in eLife, April 2020

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[biology-geology-beaches-india]

The Scientific Research Notes Of S. Sunkavally (years: 2002-2011).

3238-3242.

[strassmann]

We have a position for a postdoc on amoeba-bacteria symbiosis available immediately!

We have a position for a postdoc on amoeba-bacteria symbiosis available immediately!

The fabulous Queller-Strassmann lab group!

Finally we got the call from NSF that our grant proposal was being recommended for funding in full. This new funding uses the social amoeba bacteria symbiosis to tease out exactly how mutualisms work, with both empirical work and theory. I am the PI on this grant. We have another one funded last year that David Queller is PI on. A new postdoc can work on…

View On WordPress

[currentsinbiology]

Farming amoebae carry around detoxifying food

Five years ago, the Queller-Strassmann lab at Rice University, now at Washington University in St. Louis, demonstrated that the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum -- affectionately nicknamed "Dicty" -- can maintain a crop of food bacteria from generation to generation, giving these farmers an advantage when food is scarce.

Now, new research from the same team shows that these microscopic farmers also rely on their symbiotic bacteria to protect themselves from environmental toxins, a little-studied but increasingly clear role microbes can play for their hosts.

Research scientist Debra Brock led the new work, published April 20 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

These amoebae are content to be loners when food is abundant, but when it's depleted they come together in the tens of thousands to cooperate. They transform into a mobile slug that migrates in search of fairer conditions and then produces hardy spores to release into the environment and wait out the lean times.

The slug has a tiny pool of specialized cells, called sentinels, that protect it from pests and poisons by ferrying them away.

"The sentinel cells pass through the body, mopping up toxins, bacteria, and essentially serving as a liver, a kidney, and innate immune system and being left behind in the slime trail," said Joan Strassmann, PhD, the Charles Rebstock Professor of Biology in Arts & Sciences.

Debra A. Brock, W. Éamon Callison, Joan E. Strassmann, David C. Queller. Sentinel cells, symbiotic bacteria and toxin resistance in the social amoebaDictyostelium discoideum. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2016; 283 (1829): 20152727 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2015.2727

The social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum has both solitary and communal life stages. As long as food is abundant, it lives on its own, but when food is scarce the amoebae seek one another out. Together they form a slug that migrates toward the light and then a fruiting body that disperses spores from atop a stalk. The fruiting bodies are pictured here. Credit: Strassmann/Queller lab