The Organism

Dictyostelium discoideum, a soil-living amoeba, is an excellent organism for the study of the molecular mechanisms of cell motility, signal transduction, cell-type differentiation and developmental processes. Genes involved in any of these processes can be knocked-out rapidly by targeted homologous recombination. Since Dictyostelium is haploid, mutants are readily isolated and the REMI (restriction enzyme mediated integration) technique of insertional mutagenesis allows the facile cloning of disrupted genes. The determination of the entire information content of the Dictyostelium genome will be of great value to those working with this organism directly, as well as to those who would like to determine the functions of homologous genes from other species.

The Genome

The hereditary information is carried on 6 chromosomes with sizes ranging from 4 to 7 Mb resulting in a total of about 34 Mb of DNA, a multicopy 90 kb extrachromosomal element that harbours the rRNA genes, and the 55 kb mitochondrial genome. The estimated number of genes in the genome is 8,000 to 10,000 and many of the known genes show a high degree of sequence similarity to homologues in vertebrate species.

The Project

The Dictyostelium discoideum genome project is an international collaboration between the University of Cologne, the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology, Department of Genome Analysis in Jena, the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, and the Sanger Centre in Hinxton. It is currently funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the European Union (EU).

   Working team of the DFG-funded part of the project
   International consortium of the Dictyostelium Genome Project
   International Advisory Board
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