Resetting Wave Forms in Dictyostelium Territories

The mechanism by which spiral wave patterns appear in populations of Dictyostelium was probed experimentally by external chemical perturbation. Spiral waves, which often arise from the breakup of circular waves driven by pacemakers, typically entrain those pacemakers. We studied these processes by resetting the waves with a spatially uniform pulse of extrinsic cyclic AMP. A pattern of spirals reappeared if resetting was early in the signaling stage, but only targets emerged following late resetting, in a manner analogous to cardiac defibrillation. This supports recent hypotheses that wave pattern selection naturally occurs by slow temporal variation of the excitability of the cells.