In the picture: Dicty roses

Dictyostelium is a remarkable organism. This amoeba lives in the soil as single cells, but when the food runs out they crawl together to form aggregates that develop into multicellular fruiting bodies with spores that can survive harsh circumstances. During her PhD research, Marjon Kamp gave these cells a colour and filmed them with a microscope. With this picture she won the photo contest organized by MindMint at the PhD day in 2018. Here you can see a movie of the moving cells.

Technical description by Marjon:

“In our research we investigate mutant Dictyostelium cells that are defective in cell-cell communication or cell movement. Here we made a mutant missing one gene encoding the protein LrrA. The mutant has difficulties to aggregate. In this experiment we wanted to know whether wild-type (normal) cells can help mutant cells to join the aggregate. We mixed wild-type and mutant cells in in a 80:20 ratio. The wild-type cells do not contain fluorescence markers and can only be seen vaguely in black and white. The mutant cells contain a red fluorescent marker in their cytoplasm, while their cytoskeleton (actin) has a green fluorescent marker. With this experiment we were able to tell when and where the mutant cells end up when forming aggregates.”