Programmed Cell Death in Slime Molds
The social slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum has the peculiarity of either adopting a predatory amoeba-like behavior in its unicellular form or coalescing into a mobile slug-like form when dispersing the spores that will give birth to the next generation.
The stalk is composed of dead cells that have undergone a type of PCD that shares many features of an autophagic cell-death: massive vacuoles forming inside cells, a degree of chromatin condensation, but no DNA fragmentation. The structural role of the residues left by the dead cells is reminiscent of the products of PCD in plant tissue.
D. discoideum is a slime mold, part of a branch that might have emerged from eukaryotic ancestors about a billion years before the present. It seems that they emerged after the ancestors of green plants and the ancestors of fungi and animals had differentiated. But, in addition to their place in the evolutionary tree, the fact that PCD has been observed in the humble, simple, six-chromosome D. discoideum has additional significance: It permits the study of a developmental PCD path that does not depend on caspases characteristic of apoptosis.
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