Cellular allorecognition and its roles in Dictyostelium development and social evolution

Abstract

The social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum is a tractable model organism to study cellular allorecognition, which is the ability of a cell to distinguish itself and its genetically similar relatives from more distantly related organisms. Cellular allorecognition is ubiquitous across the tree of life and affects many biological processes. Depending on the biological context, these versatile systems operate both within and between individual organisms, and both promote and constrain functional heterogeneity. Some of the most notable allorecognition systems mediate neural self-avoidance in flies and adaptive immunity in vertebrates. D. discoideum’s allorecognition system shares several structures and functions with other allorecognition systems. Structurally, its key regulators reside at a single genomic locus that encodes two highly polymorphic proteins, a transmembrane ligand called TgrC1 and its receptor TgrB1. These proteins exhibit isoform-specific, heterophilic binding across cells. Functionally, this interaction determines the extent to which co-developing D. discoideum strains co-aggregate or segregate during the aggregation phase of multicellular development. The allorecognition system thus affects both development and social evolution, as available evidence suggests that the threat of developmental cheating represents a primary selective force acting on it. Other significant characteristics that may inform the study of allorecognition in general include that D. discoideum’s allorecognition system is a continuous and inclusive trait, it is pleiotropic, and it is temporally regulated.

The conserved serine transporter SdaC moonlights to enable self recognition

“…Molecular crosstalk mirrors observed interactions between nutrient availability, collective behavior, and self recognition in many organisms. Collective behaviors are associated with nutrient limitation in other microbes (Kundert & Shaulsky, 2019; Wall, 2014), fungi (Gonçalves et al, 2020), and plants (Palmer et al, 2016). Collective behaviors can allow for sharing of nutrients and promote developmental processes such as fruiting body formation.…”

The WIPI Gene Family and Neurodegenerative Diseases: Insights From Yeast and Dictyostelium Models

“…Dictyostelium belongs to the amoebozoa group, and although this group of organisms diverged before the opistokonta (fungi and animals), it retains many features of animal cells that have been lost during the evolution of fungi. Cell motility and chemotaxis, phagocytosis and macropynocytosis are very similar to those observed in animal cells and Dictyostelium presents a multicellular stage that allows the study of cell differentiation and morphogenesis (see this series of reviews collected in a special issue dedicated to Dictyostelium in IJDB ( Araki and Saito, 2019 ; Batsios et al, 2019 ; Bloomfield, 2019 ; Bozzaro, 2019 ; Consalvo et al, 2019 ; Escalante and Cardenal-Muñoz, 2019 ; Farinholt et al, 2019 ; Fey et al, 2019 ; Fischer and Eichinger, 2019 ; Ishikawa-Ankerhold and Müller-Taubenberger, 2019 ; Jaiswal et al, 2019 ; Kawabe et al, 2019 ; Kay et al, 2019 ; Knecht et al, 2019 ; Kundert and Shaulsky, 2019 ; Kuspa and Shaulsky, 2019 ; Medina et al, 2019 ; Nanjundiah, 2019 ; Pal et al, 2019 ; Pearce et al, 2019 ; Pergolizzi et al, 2019 ; Schaf et al, 2019 ; Vines and King, 2019 ). Individual Dictyostelium cells ingest bacteria and yeasts in soil and the transition to a multicellular state, triggered when the food source is depleted, is accomplished by aggregation of preexisting cells.…”

A moonlighting function of a chitin polysaccharide monooxygenase, CWR-1, in allorecognition in Neurospora crassa

“…Allorecognition is the ability of a cell to recognize self or kin and has widespread importance for many organisms that have multicellular organization. Allorecognition in some form is utilized by the social amoeba, Dictyostelium discoideum (Kundert and Shaulsky, 2019;Kuzdzal-Fick, et al, 2011) the bacterium, Proteus mirabilis (Gibbs, Mark, and Greenberg, 2008;Gibbs and Greenberg, 2011), gymnosperms (Pandey, 1960), slime molds (Clark, 2003;Shaulsky and Kessin, 2007), and invertebrates, such as Botryllus schlosseri (De Tomaso et al, 2005;Rosengarten and Nicotra, 2011; . CC-BY 4.0 International license available under a (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.…”