Classic papers on signaling and aggregation of amoebae
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. (more…)