Abstract
The discovery of polarized epithelial tissue in the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum establishes this classical model organism as a novel system for the study of epithelial polarity and morphogenesis. D. discoideum grows as single cells and is easily maintained in cell culture. Starvation of the cells triggers a multicellular developmental process that culminates with the formation of a fruiting body, whose normal morphogenesis is dependent on a polarized epithelium located at the apex of the developing structure. Here, we discuss techniques for genetic manipulation and imaging of multicellular D. discoideum, with a focus on methods that have facilitated the study of the epithelial tissue in this organism.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Doug Robinson, Thierry Soldati, Jim Spudich, Masatsune Tsujioka, and Hans Warrick for technical advice that aided in the development of these methods. We thank Adrian Harwood, Manuel Hotz, and Andre Mueller for careful reading of the manuscript, and Catherine Carswell-Crumpton for assistance with flow cytometry. Our work on Dictyostelium was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (D.J.D.), NIH GM035527 (W.J.N.), and NIH GM56169 (W.I.W.).
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Dickinson, D.J., Nelson, W.J., Weis, W.I. (2015). Studying Epithelial Morphogenesis in Dictyostelium . In: Nelson, C. (eds) Tissue Morphogenesis. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1189. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1164-6_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1164-6_18
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