Development

The development of Dictyostelium appears to exploit general properties of spiral waves. Using PDE's as well as combined reaction diffusion and individual oriented models, we explained the formation of streams in terms of wave front instabilities; the conditions of the front instabilities were confirmed in experiments (25,48,62).
Moreover we were able to let the entire development from single cells to a crawling slug unfold in a 2 scale CA-type model incorporating cell to cell signaling, chemotaxis and differential adhesion (64). Current work shows these model slugs to exhibit phototaxis and thermotaxis like Dictyostelium-slugs and we will try to extend this model towards the fruiting stage.

The 2-scale CA model formalism in which biological cells occupy many CA-cells, is very interesting for studying cellular processes (67) and we now use it also for in studying lymphocyte selection in germinal centers and the evolution of gene-regulation and development.