Editorial: Dictyostelium: A Tractable Cell and Developmental Model in Biomedical Research
Robert J. Huber, Robin S. B. Williams, Annette Müller‐Taubenberger
Abstract
For almost a century, the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum has been used as an inexpensive and high-throughput model system for studying a variety of fundamental cellular and developmental processes including cell movement, chemotaxis, differentiation, and autophagy (Mller-Taubenberger et al., 2013; The life cycle of Dictyostelium is comprised of a unicellular growth phase and a 24-h multicellular developmental phase with distinct stages (Figure Dictyostelium development shares many common features with metazoan development but occurs in a much shorter time frame, which allows for the rapid detection of developmental phenotypes. The fully sequenced, low redundancy genome of Dictyostelium provides a less complex system to work with, whilst still maintaining many genes and related signalling pathways found in more complex eukaryotes The Dictyostelium genome is haploid, which allows researchers to introduce one or multiple gene disruptions with relative ease, and gene function can be studied in a true multicellular organism with measurable phenotypic outcomes