Dr. Joan Strassmann
Conflict and Cooperation in Social Amoebae
Have you ever heard of social amoebae? These single-celled
creatures are predators on bacteria in their natural forest
floor habitat. When they starve they join together with
lots of other amoebae to form a multicellular slug that
crawls towards light, then fruits. In fruiting, 20% of amoebae
die to form a stalk and lift the others up towards the light.
This social altruism is just like that in ant or honeybee
colonies, but since it occurs in an amoeba we can get at
molecular angles, do laboratory experiments, and advance
our understanding of social evolution. This social amoeba,
Dictyostelium discoideum, has a nearly sequenced genome,
and many identified molecular pathways that we can use to
understand its social behavior. It lives happily in a petri
dish, eating harmless bacteria, so the student who chooses
this project can have a lot of independence in experimenting,
analyzing and writing up his/her study.
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