Data for: From individual behaviors to collective outcomes: fruiting body formation in Dictyostelium as a group-level phenotype

Collective phenotypes, which arise from the interactions among
individuals, can be important for the evolution of higher levels of
biological organization. However, how a group’s composition determines its
collective phenotype remains poorly understood. When starved, cells of the
social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum cooperate to build a multicellular
fruiting body, and the morphology of the fruiting body is likely
advantageous to the surviving spores. We assessed how the number of
strains, as well as their genetic and geographic relationships to one
another, impact the group’s morphology and productivity. We find that some
strains consistently enhance or detract from the productivity of their
groups, regardless of the identity of the other group members. We also
detect extensive pairwise and higher-order genotype interactions, which
collectively have a large influence on the group phenotype. Whereas
previous work in Dictyostelium has focused almost exclusively on whether
spore production is equitable when strains cooperate to form multicellular
fruiting bodies, our results suggest a previously unrecognized impact of
chimeric co-development on the group phenotype. Our results demonstrate
how interactions among members of a group influence collective phenotypes
and how group phenotypes might in turn impact selection on the individual.