Dictyostelium: A Tractable Cell

For almost a century the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum has served as an inexpensive and high-throughput model system for studying a variety of fundamental cellular processes including cell movement, chemotaxis, differentiation, morphogenesis, and autophagy. This eukaryotic microbe, which is part of the National Institutes of Health model organism initiative for biomedical and human disease research, is genetically tractable and undergoes a 24-hour life cycle composed of both single cell and multicellular phases.

The Dictyostelium genome encodes many homologs of genes associated with human disease and therefore serves as a unique and powerful model system for studying a variety of human diseases. Dictyostelium development shares many common events with metazoan development but occurs in a much shorter time frame (24 hours), which allows for the rapid detection of developmental phenotypes. Since the genome is haploid, researchers can introduce one or multiple gene disruptions with relative ease (e.g., REMI mutagenesis, homologous recombination, CRISPR/Cas9-mediated targeting) and gene function can be studied in a true multicellular organism with measurable phenotypic outcomes. Use of insertional mutant libraries can also facilitate pharmacogenetics screens to provide improved understanding of the function of bioactive compounds at a cellular level. Finally, the signaling pathways that regulate the behavior of Dictyostelium cells are remarkably similar to those observed in mammalian cells, which has allowed findings from Dictyostelium to be successfully translated to mammalian systems. Thus, Dictyostelium has, and will continue to offer, excellent opportunities to advance biomedical research.

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