Abstract
Dictyostelium has become a model organism for the study of social evolution because of the stage in its life cycle where thousands of independent amoebae together form a fruiting body. Some individuals die to form a stalk that holds aloft the remaining cells for dispersal to new environments as spores. Different genotypes can aggregate together, creating opportunities for exploitation by cheaters that contribute a smaller proportion of cells to the stalk. Clustering of genotypes into separate fruiting bodies reduces the opportunities for cheating. Some genotypes achieve this by segregating after aggregation. Here we describe techniques for assaying cheating and segregation in D. discoideum. We cover how to grow and maintain cells, fluorescently label genotypes, design experiments for accuracy and precision, calculate fitness and segregation, and interpret the results.
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Christopher Thompson, Gadi Shaulsky, Adam Kuspa, and everyone over the years who has helped to perfect these techniques from the Strassmann–Queller lab and beyond. This work was funded by NSF Grants DEB 1011513 and NSF DEB 0918931.
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Buttery, N.J., Smith, J., Queller, D.C., Strassmann, J.E. (2013). Measuring Cheating, Fitness, and Segregation in Dictyostelium discoideum . In: Eichinger, L., Rivero, F. (eds) Dictyostelium discoideum Protocols. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 983. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-62703-302-2_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-62703-302-2_12
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