Useful social amoeba

摘要

THE amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum lives in the forest litter of temperate regions. It has a curious life cycle. As a single cell it feeds on bacteria and divides by splitting into two daughter cells. But if food is insufficient the cells aggregate to form a fruiting body of about 50,000 cells. This latter form gives the organism its other name, the social amoeba. D discoideum can also be grown in the laboratory using a bacterial lawn as a food source. D discoideum has proved to be an ideal model organism for studying a range of biomedical systems such as phagocytosis, signal transduction, chemotaxis, cellular differentiation, cell motility and cytokinesis.