Colorized light micrograph of D. discoldeum early culminantDICTYBASE.ORG
Dictyostelium discoideum is a social amoeba: a single-celled organism that can group together to form a multicellular slug. Although it has mostly been used as an experimental model for studying chemotaxis, cell-cell communication, and the evolution of sociality, some researchers are using it as a window into how multicellular life could have evolved. Now, Daniel Dickinson, a graduate student at Stanford University, has discovered that the Dictyostelium slug does more than simply take on a multicellular form; it also creates a tissue that has only ever been seen before in animals.
When Dickinson became a student of William Weis and James Nelson, who collaborate to study the adhesion protein a-catenin—a membrane protein necessary for forming epithelial tissues in animals—he wanted to explore how a-catenin had ...
