Laboratory for the Physics of Life Thomas Gregor, Professor of Physics, Princeton University

Over the next few months/years I’d like to use this website to build up a repository of information on the various topics that we study in the lab. Today as a beginning I am introducing 4 classic papers that pioneered a system-level description and quantitative understanding of this spectacular phenomenon:

In this movie roughly 200 starved amoebae of the species Dictyostelium discoideum are shown over 8 hours during which they find each other and culminate in a cellular slime mould. This process is seen as a survival strategy because individual amoebae would die under starvation whereas as in the multi-cellular organism 80% of the cells can survive as spores.

Here are 4 early papers that originally described the different aspects of this process:

1. Aspects of Aggregation in Cellular Slime Moulds 1. Orientation and Chemotaxis

   The American Naturalist 91, pp. 19-35 (1957)

2. Cyclic AMP as a first messenger

   TM Konijin, Advances in cyclic nucleotide research 1, pp. 17-31 (1972)

3. Signal propagation during aggregation in the slime mould Dictyostelium discoideum

   J Gen Microbiol 85, pp.321-34 (1974)

4. The control of morphogenesis in Dictyostelium discoideum

   AJ Durston, in “Eucaryotic Microbes as Model Developmental Systems”, edited by O’Day DH, Horgen PA. New York: M. Dekker; pp. 294-321 (1977)