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Over the last few years, a combination of genetic, molecular, and biochemical approaches has led to significant new insights into the regulation of development in Dictyostelium and has uncovered new pathways that may also control developmental decisions in other systems. In Dictyostelium, the vegetative growth and the multicellular developmental portions of the life cycle are separated; wild-type Dictyostelium strains are haploid, and multicellular development, which is initiated by starvation, takes place in the absence of cell division. Thus, many genes that are essential for the multicellular phase have no effect on growth, facilitating genetic analysis of gene products essential for multicellular development. The general developmental program of Dictyostelium is depicted in Figure
Richard Firtel (Thu,) studied this question.