Cell-cell signaling is subject to variability in the extracellular volume, cell number, and dilution that potentially increase uncertainty in the absolute concentrations of the extracellular signaling molecules. To direct cell aggregation, the social amoebae Dictyostelium discoideum collectively give rise to oscillations and waves of cyclic adenosine 3′,5′-monophosphate (cAMP) under a wide range of cell density. To date, the systems-level mechanism underlying the robustness is unclear. By using quantitative live-cell imaging, here we show that the magnitude of the cAMP relay response of individual cells is determined by fold change in the extracellular cAMP concentrations. The range of cell density and exogenous cAMP concentrations that support oscillations at the population level agrees well with conditions that support a large fold-change-dependent response at the singlecell level. Mathematical analysis suggests that invariance of the oscillations to density transformation is a natural outcome of combining secrete-and-sense systems with a fold-change detection mechanism.fold-change detection | oscillations | collective behavior | Dictyostelium | robustness C ell-cell signaling lies at the basis of development and maintenance of multicellular forms of life. Extracellular signals are often subject to greater fluctuations in the size of extracellular space and the number of cells (Fig. 1A), not to mention nonspecific binding to other molecules, degradation, and dilution. These factors introduce an uncertainty to the detectable number of extracellular ligand molecules, thus posing a threat to the fidelity of cell-cell communication. One of the means by which cells could cope with such uncertainties is to base their behavioral decisions on temporal changes in the extracellular signals. Persistent stimuli are often ignored while their changes in time elicit transient responses-a property collectively called adaptation (1-3). Recent studies have highlighted cellular response whose magnitude appears to be dictated by the fold change in the input stimuli-a property referred to as "fold-change detection" (FCD) (4, 5). In bacterial chemotaxis, cells respond adaptively to a fold change in chemoattractant concentration (6) so that their search patterns depend only on the spatial profiles of the chemoattractant irrespective of its absolute level. Fold-change dependence is also implied in eukaryotic chemotactic response (7, 8) as well as cell fate control and gene regulation in Xenopus embryo (9), Drosophila imaginal disk (10), and mammalian cells (11). These studies have shed light on the role of FCD for a simple unidirectional signal transduction from an extracellular ligand-receptor interaction (input) to a cellular response (output). However, cell-cell signaling and multicellular systems as a whole often use secretion and sensing of the same molecules (12), whereby the output is fed back to the responding cell itself in addition to the neighboring cells, thus forming a complex bidirectional signal transduction system. Th...