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Science 27 October 2006:
Vol. 314. no. 5799, pp. 661 - 663
DOI: 10.1126/science.1130670
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Reports

Molecular Phylogeny and Evolution of Morphology in the Social Amoebas

Pauline Schaap,1 Thomas Winckler,2 Michaela Nelson,3 Elisa Alvarez-Curto,1 Barrie Elgie,3 Hiromitsu Hagiwara,4 James Cavender,5 Alicia Milano-Curto,1 Daniel E. Rozen,1* Theodor Dingermann,6,7 Rupert Mutzel,8 Sandra L. Baldauf3{delta}

The social amoebas (Dictyostelia) display conditional multicellularity in a wide variety of forms. Despite widespread interest in Dictyostelium discoideum as a model system, almost no molecular data exist from the rest of the group. We constructed the first molecular phylogeny of the Dictyostelia with parallel small subunit ribosomal RNA and a-tubulin data sets, and we found that dictyostelid taxonomy requires complete revision. A mapping of characters onto the phylogeny shows that the dominant trend in dictyostelid evolution is increased size and cell type specialization of fruiting structures, with some complex morphologies evolving several times independently. Thus, the latter may be controlled by only a few genes, making their underlying mechanisms relatively easy to unravel.

1 School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee, DD15EH Dundee, UK.
2 Lehrstuhl für Pharmazeutische Biologie, Universität Jena, Semmelweisstrasse 10, 07743 Jena, Germany.
3 Department of Biology, University of York, Box 373, York YO10 5YW, UK.
4 Department of Botany, Tokyo National Science Museum, Tsukuba Botanical Garden, 4-1-1, Amakubo, Tsukuba-shi, Ibaraki 305-0005, Japan.
5 Department of Environmental and Plant Biology, Ohio University, 307 Porter Hall, Athens, OH 45701, USA.
6 Institut für Pharmazeutische Biologie, Universität Frankfurt, Marie-Curie-Strasse 9, 60439 Frankfurt, Germany.
7 Zentrum für Arzneimittelforschung, Entwicklung und Sicherheit (ZAFES), Frankfurt, Germany.
8 Institut für Biologie, Fachbereich Biologie, Chemie, Pharmazie, Freie Universität Berlin, Königin-Luise Strasse 12-16, 14195 Berlin, Germany.

* Present address: Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PT, UK.

{delta} To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: slb14{at}york.ac.uk

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