Dictyostelium discoideum, strain AX2, a novel model system for studying Autophagy

Copyright: © Author, This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial No Derives License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is noncommercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. Dictyostelium is an eukaryote, a protist, and a slime mold. Dictyostelium shows developmental vacuolated cell death (autophagy) in the stalk. Macroautophagy is an intracellular degradative process for cytosolic components at the lysosome. Derailing of this mechanism is implicated in several neurodegenerative diseases, as it leads to accumulation of mutant aggregate proteins. Dictyostelium lacks the required machinery for apoptosis, and undergoes cell death only by autophagy or necrosis. Starvation in Dictyostelium sets in the mode of multicellular development in which stalk cells enlarge and altruistically die by autophagy which can be mimicked in vitro. In the present work, Lithium and Valproic acid were used to observe autophagy in the AX2 strain. Monolayer cultures of AX2 strain of Dictyostelium was standardized to observe the percentage of vacuolated autophagic cells using microscopic and staining techniques. Our studies established that AX2 strain can be a new model system to study autophagic cell death in neurodegeneration and can be used as a pharmacological model for putative drugs as well.