The Cold War of the Social Amoebae

When confronted with starvation, the amoebae of Dictyostelium discoideum initiate a developmental process that begins with cell aggregation and ends with a ball of spores supported on a stalk. Spores live and stalk cells die. Because the multicellular organism is produced by cell aggregation and not by growth and division of a single cell, genetically diverse amoebae may enter an aggregate and, if one lineage has a capacity to avoid the stalk cell fate, it may have a selective advantage. Such cheater mutants have been found among wild isolates and created in laboratory strains. The mutants raise a number of questions--how did such a cooperative system evolve in the face of cheating? What is the basis of self recognition? What genes are involved? How is cheating constrained? This review summarizes the results of studies on the social behavior of Dictyostelium and its relatives, including the familiar asexual developmental cycle and the lesser known, but puzzling, sexual cycle.