Most multicellular organisms, like humans, form from a single cell. By contrast, the social amoeba forms a multicellular body by aggregating individual cells from a small area. This difference allows the investigators to evaluate genetic conflicts within an organism more easily than if they had to find new mutations. The investigators will characterize the genetic variation in cells in a natural habitat, and will then investigate how these cells interact when they come together in a multicellular individual. They will evaluate how often some cell lines dominate over other cell lines, forcing them to die.
How cells interact with each other is an important question that bears on many fundamental problems in biology. For example, cells that escape the control of other cells and continue to divide characterize cancer. Programmed cell death is an important mechanism for ridding an organism of cells in the wrong place or that have certain kinds of defects. When the social amoeba forms a fruiting body, some cells die while others live. Understanding the process whereby some cells escape the process of programmed cell death, and perhaps force other cells to die is of potential relevance to mechanisms for understanding cancer, and human developmental diseases.
