ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Fitness tradeoffs between spores and nonaggregating cells can explain the coexistence of diverse genotypes in cellular slime molds.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 34 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
34 citing papers in PubMed.
- Lives in a gram of soil: linking life cycle biology to soil ecology.The ISME journal · 2026Review
- Article
- Micro-to multi-chimerism: the multiple facets of a singular phenomenon.Seminars in immunopathology · 2025Review
- Adaptive evolutionary trajectories in complexity: Transitions between unicellularity and facultative differentiated multicellularity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Cell size and selection for stress-induced cell fusion in unicellular eukaryotes.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- The greenbeard gene tgrB1 regulates altruism and cheating in Dictyostelium discoideum.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Group-selection via aggregative propagule-formation enables cooperative multicellularity in an individual based, spatial model.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Hidden functional complexity in the flora of an early land ecosystem.The New phytologist · 2024Article
- Reduced social function in experimentally evolvedProceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Article
- Developmental constraints enforce altruism and avert the tragedy of the commons in a social microbe.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Does Cancer Biology Rely on Parrondo's Principles?Cancers · 2021Review
- Aggregative cycles evolve as a solution to conflicts in social investment.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Article
- Eco-evolutionary significance of "loners".PLoS biology · 2020Article
- WildEcology and evolution · 2020Article
- Spatial eco-evolutionary feedbacks mediate coexistence in prey-predator systems.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Does resource availability help determine the evolutionary route to multicellularity?Evolution & development · 2019Article
- Cellular allorecognition and its roles in Dictyostelium development and social evolution.The International journal of developmental biology · 2019Review
- Selection for synchronized cell division in simple multicellular organisms.Journal of theoretical biology · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Cellular slime molds, including the well-studied Dictyostelium discoideum, are amoebae whose life cycle includes both a single-cellular and a multicellular stage. To achieve the multicellular stage, individual amoebae aggregate upon starvation to form a fruiting body made of dead stalk cells and reproductive spores, a process that has been described in terms of cooperation and altruism. When amoebae aggregate they do not perfectly discriminate against nonkin, leading to chimeric fruiting bodies. Within chimeras, complex interactions among genotypes have been documented, which should theoretically reduce genetic diversity. This is however inconsistent with the great diversity of genotypes found in nature. Recent work has shown that a little-studied component of D. discoideum fitness--the loner cells that do not participate in the aggregation--can be selected for depending on environmental conditions and that, together with the spores, they could represent a bet-hedging strategy. We suggest that in all cellular slime molds the existence of loners could resolve the apparent diversity paradox in two ways. First, if loners are accounted for, then apparent genotypic skew in the spores of chimeras could simply be the result of different investments into spores versus loners. Second, in an ecosystem with multiple local environments differing in their food recovery characteristics and connected globally via weak-to-moderate dispersal, coexistence of multiple genotypes can occur. Finally, we argue that the loners make it impossible to define altruistic behavior, winners or losers, without a clear description of the ecology.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.