A flagellate-to-amoeboid switch in the closest living relatives of animals

Thibaut Brunet, Marvin Albert, William Roman, Maxwell C. Coyle, Danielle C. Spitzer, Nicole King

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleResearchpeer-review

39 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Amoeboid cells are fundamental to animal biology and broadly distributed across animal diversity, but their evolutionary origin is unclear. The closest living relatives of animals, the choanoflagellates, display a polarized cell architecture (with an apical flagellum encircled by microvilli) that closely resembles that of epithelial cells and suggests homology, but this architecture differs strikingly from the deformable phenotype of animal amoeboid cells. Here, we show that choanoflagellates subjected to confinement differentiate into an amoeboid form by retracting their flagella and activating myosin-based motility. This switch allows escape from confinement and is conserved across choanoflagellate diversity. The conservation of the amoeboid cell phenotype across animals and choanoflagellates, together with the conserved role of myosin, is consistent with the homology of amoeboid motility in both lineages. We hypothesize that the differentiation between animal epithelial and crawling cells might have evolved from a stress-induced phenotypic switch between flagellate and amoeboid forms in their single-celled ancestors.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere61037
Number of pages30
JournaleLife
Volume10
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 15 Jan 2021
Externally publishedYes

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