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Altruism and social cheating in the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum

Nature volume 408, pages 965–967 (2000)Cite this article

Abstract

The social amoeba, Dictyostelium discoideum, is widely used as a simple model organism for multicellular development1,2, but its multicellular fruiting stage is really a society. Most of the time, D. discoideum lives as haploid, free-living, amoeboid cells that divide asexually. When starved, 104–105 of these cells aggregate into a slug. The anterior 20% of the slug altruistically differentiates into a non-viable stalk, supporting the remaining cells, most of which become viable spores3,4,5. If aggregating cells come from multiple clones, there should be selection for clones to exploit other clones by contributing less than their proportional share to the sterile stalk. Here we use microsatellite markers to show that different clones collected from a field population readily mix to form chimaeras. Half of the chimaeric mixtures show a clear cheater and victim. Thus, unlike the clonal and highly cooperative development of most multicellular organisms, the development of D. discoideum is partly competitive, with conflicts of interests among cells. These conflicts complicate the use of D. discoideum as a model for some aspects of development, but they make it highly attractive as a model system for social evolution.

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Figure 1: Microsatellite genotypes of slugs from two-clone mixture experiments.
Figure 2: Relative contributions of mixed clones to prespore and prestalk regions of chimaeras.

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Acknowledgements

We thank R. Gomer for advice and training; D. Welker for supplying the clones; J. Keay, W. Castle, S. Reddy and J. Damon for assistance with laboratory work; and D. Rozen, R. Kessin, G. Velicer and J. Bonner for comments on the manuscript. This work was supported in part by the US National Science Foundation.

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  1. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Rice University, PO Box 1892, Houston, 77251-1892, Texas, USA

    Joan E. Strassmann, Yong Zhu & David C. Queller

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  1. Joan E. Strassmann
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Correspondence to Joan E. Strassmann.

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Strassmann, J., Zhu, Y. & Queller, D. Altruism and social cheating in the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. Nature 408, 965–967 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35050087

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