blog

A day later due to the UK bank holiday, but here is this week’s selection of new content on F1000Research from the past week. To receive notification of all new articles, sign up for our table of contents alerts.

Featured article:

An evolutionarily significant unicellular strategy in response to starvation stress in Dictyostelium social amoebae.
Darja Dubravcic, Minus van Baalen, Clément Nizak

When faced with the prospect of starvation, the single-cell amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum joins forces with its neighboring cells, forming a multicellular body that eventually develops into a sac of spores suspended on a stalk. This ‘fruiting body’ then disperses its spores, with the aim that some will land in areas with better food security. However, some don’t join in, which raises the question as to why these cells seemingly ‘choose’ to risk starvation rather than participate in an endeavor that could ensure their continued existence.

The experiments described in this article by Dubravcic et al. suggest that D. discoideum is employing a bet-hedging strategy in response to starvation. The non-aggregation option (taken by 15% of cells in realistic conditions) is advantageous in environments where food availability is unpredictable. For instance, if food suddenly became available the non-aggregators can immediately go back to growing and multiplying, whilst the aggregators have to go through all the developmental stages that lead to sporulation before the cells can start feeding again. However, under prolonged starvation conditions solitary cells have a shorter lifespan and so the multicellular option is the better bet in such conditions.

Other indexed articles:

Congenital duplication of the urethra with urethral diverticulum: a case report [v1; ref status: indexed, https://f1000r.es/36h]
Darshan H Shah, Arvind P Ganpule, Ravindra B Sabnis, Mahesh R Desai

Case Report: Solitary mastocytoma treated successfully with topical tacrolimus [v1; ref status: indexed, https://f1000r.es/2p1]
M. S. Sukesh, Ameet Dandale, Rachita Dhurat, Ankur Sarkate, Smita Ghate

Newly published:

EpiCollect+: linking smartphones to web applications for complex data collection projects [v1; ref status: awaiting peer review, https://f1000r.es/3vk]
David M. Aanensen, Derek M. Huntley, Mirko Menegazzo, Chris I. Powell, Brian G. Spratt