Spiral Waves of the Chemo-Attractant cAMP Organise Multicellular Development in the Social Amoebae Dictyostelium discoideum

Abstract

Development of multicellular organisms requires precise spatial and temporal integration of key cellular behaviours such as cell division, cell differentiation and cell movement to form the complex tissues that make up the organism. These cell behaviours are controlled by highly dynamic cell-cell signalling while these cell behaviours in turn feedback on the cell-cell signalling to result in emergent behaviours at the tissue and organism level. Dictyostelium discoideum is a relatively simple eukaryotic organism that is a widely used to study these interactions between cell-cell signalling and cell behaviours both experimentally and theoretically. This chapter describes our current understanding of how excitable cell-cell signalling results in the formation and propagation of large scale spiral waves of a chemo-attractant. How these chemo-attractant waves control the aggregation of hundreds of thousands of cells into multicellular aggregates and how interactions between excitable cell-cell signalling and cell movement control the transformation of aggregates into mounds and migrating slugs, that then go on to form fruiting bodies.