Kinship is a crucial element in many kinds of cooperation. In order for individuals to cooperate with their kin they must identify their relatives somehow. This can happen through the structure of the environment, or through active recognition processes. Recognition and cooperation can benefit many kinds of organisms. Some of these organisms include microbes where cooperation can actually harm the animal hosts, so understanding kin recognition and cooperation in microbes can have important implications for human welfare.
The investigators will study kin structure and recognition in a social amoeba that has a solitary stage where it eats bacteria and a social stage where it aggregates into a multi-cellular collective that moves and produces spores. They have found that this amoeba can distinguish between related and unrelated individuals and these amoebae use this ability to avoid unrelated amoebae and to protect certain kinds of bacteria. The investigators will test different mechanisms for recognizing relatives in this system. They will document the growth patterns of the amoebae as they prey upon bacteria. They will examine genes for recognition and they will consider the role of dispersal distance in recognition. Furthermore the investigators will explore the mechanisms through which these amoebae exploit the toxicity of bacteria. Taken together, this research has great potential to promote our understanding of the interactions between microbes; which in turn will contribute to our understanding of how microbes directly affect humans and the environment in which we live. The project will contribute to the scientific training of undergraduate and graduate students and will reach out to the public via websites, Wikipedia entries, and events for K-12 students.
