Vogel David, Dussutour Audrey
Research Centre on Animal Cognition (CRCA), Centre for Integrative Biology (CBI), Toulouse University, CNRS, UPS, 31062 Toulouse, France.
Unit of Social Ecology, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1050 Brussels, Belgium.
Proc Biol Sci. 2016 Dec 28;283(1845). doi: 10.1098/rspb.2016.2382.
Cell fusion is a fundamental phenomenon observed in all eukaryotes. Cells can exchange resources such as molecules or organelles during fusion. In this paper, we ask whether a cell can also transfer an adaptive response to a fusion partner. We addressed this question in the unicellular slime mould Physarum polycephalum, in which cell-cell fusion is extremely common. Slime moulds are capable of habituation, a simple form of learning, when repeatedly exposed to an innocuous repellent, despite lacking neurons and comprising only a single cell. In this paper, we present a set of experiments demonstrating that slime moulds habituated to a repellent can transfer this adaptive response by cell fusion to individuals that have never encountered the repellent. In addition, we show that a slime mould resulting from the fusion of a minority of habituated slime moulds and a majority of unhabituated ones still shows an adaptive response to the repellent. Finally, we further reveal that fusion must last a certain time to ensure an effective transfer of the behavioural adaptation between slime moulds. Our results provide strong experimental evidence that slime moulds exhibit transfer of learned behaviour during cell fusion and raise the possibility that similar phenomena may occur in other cell-cell fusion systems.
细胞融合是在所有真核生物中都能观察到的一种基本现象。细胞在融合过程中可以交换诸如分子或细胞器等资源。在本文中，我们探讨一个细胞是否也能将适应性反应传递给融合伙伴。我们在单细胞黏菌多头绒泡菌中研究了这个问题，在这种黏菌中细胞间融合极为常见。黏菌能够产生习惯化，这是一种简单的学习形式，当反复接触无害驱避剂时，尽管它们没有神经元且仅由单个细胞构成。在本文中，我们展示了一系列实验，证明对驱避剂产生习惯化的黏菌能够通过细胞融合将这种适应性反应传递给从未接触过该驱避剂的个体。此外，我们表明，由少数习惯化黏菌和多数未习惯化黏菌融合产生的黏菌仍然对驱避剂表现出适应性反应。最后，我们进一步揭示融合必须持续一定时间，以确保黏菌之间行为适应性的有效传递。我们的结果提供了有力的实验证据，证明黏菌在细胞融合过程中表现出学习行为的传递，并增加了类似现象可能在其他细胞间融合系统中发生的可能性。
