A surface glycoprotein indispensable for gamete fusion in the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum.

ABSTRACT: Sexual reproduction is essential for the maintenance of species in a wide variety of multicellular organisms, and even unicellular organisms that normally proliferate asexually possess a sexual cycle because of its contribution to increased genetic diversity. Information concerning the molecules involved in fertilization is accumulating for many species of the metazoan, plant, and fungal lineages, and the evolutionary consideration of sexual reproduction systems is now an interesting issue. Macrocyst formation in the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum is a sexual process in which cells become sexually mature under dark and submerged conditions and fuse with complementary mating-type cells. In the present study, we isolated D. discoideum insertional mutants defective in sexual cell fusi

SUBMITTER: Araki Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3346428 | biostudies-literature | 2012 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature