High Relatedness Is Necessary and Sufficient to Maintain Multicellularity in Dictyostelium
Abstract
Most complex multicellular organisms develop clonally from a single cell. This should limit conflicts between cell lineages that could threaten the extensive cooperation of cells within multicellular bodies. Cellular composition can be manipulated in the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum, which allows us to test and confirm the two key predictions of this theory. Experimental evolution at low relatedness favored cheating mutants that could destroy multicellular development. However, under high relatedness, the forces of mutation and within-individual selection are too small for these destructive cheaters to spread, as shown by a mutation accumulation experiment. Thus, we conclude that the single-cell bottleneck is a powerful stabilizer of cellular cooperation in multicellular organisms.
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Information & Authors
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Published In
Science
Volume 334 | Issue 6062
16 December 2011
16 December 2011
Copyright
Copyright © 2011, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Submission history
Received: 29 August 2011
Accepted: 4 November 2011
Published in print: 16 December 2011
Acknowledgments
Supported by the NSF grants DEB-0918931 and DEB-0816690. J.J.K. and S.A.F. were supported partly by Wray-Todd Graduate Fellowships. We thank J. Potter and A. Smith for laboratory work, G. Saxer for advice, and C. Kuzdzal Fick for advice and for comments on the manuscript. Data are available in the supporting online material.
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