A defined, minimal medium for the cellular slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum is reported.

Studies of chemotaxis in the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum have revealed numerous conserved signaling networks that are activated by chemoattractants. In the presence of a uniformly distributed stimulus, these pathways are transiently activated, but in a gradient they are activated persistently and can be localized to either the front or the back of the cell. Recent studies have begun ...

Interspecific cell cohesion among 4 species of cellular slime moulds, Dictyostelium discoideum, D. mucoroides, D. purpureum and Polysphondylium violaceum has been studied. Binary mixtures of aggregation-stage cells of the 4 species were shaken in suspension, one species of each pair being labelled with [3H]thymidine. Cell aggregates were sampled at intervals over 24 h and their composition exam...

Dictyostelium discoideum is a good model of autophagy. However, the lack of autophagic flux techniques hinders the assessment of new mutants or drugs. One of these techniques, which has been used successfully in yeast and mammalian cells, but has not yet been described in Dictyostelium, is based on the presence of proteolytic fragments derived from autophagic degradation of expressed fusion pro...

We have isolated a 30,000-dalton protein from Dictyostelium which cosedimented with and affected the low shear viscosity of actin. At low concentrations, this protein increased the low shear viscosity to greater than that of the actin control, whereas higher concentrations decreased viscosity. The viscosity decrease correlated with the formation of actin filament bundles, as seen electron micro...

When spores of Dictyostelium discoideum matured through normal development were stained with rhodamine-phalloidin, rod-shaped fluorescence was found across the nucleus and in the cytoplasm. Electron micrographs of the rod shape showed that it consisted of long and straight fibers 12 nm in diameter. In contrast, a conventional actin rod, which usually is formed under stress conditions, is compos...

While studies on metazoan cell proliferation, cell differentiation, and cytokine signaling laid the foundation of the current paradigms of tyrosine kinase signaling, similar studies using lower eukaryotes have provided invaluable insight for the understanding of mammalian pathways, such as Wnt and STAT pathways. Dictyostelium is one of the leading lower eukaryotic model systems where stress-ind...

A rapid, simple method for characterization of plasmid insertions in the Dictyostelium discoideum genome was developed. It is based on the capability of linear plasmid multimers in the insertions to recircularize efficiently in Escherichia coli cells. This recombinational recircularization of plasmid multimers provides a highly sensitive and reliable tool for determining whether individual Dict...