Document Type
Article
Publication Date
5-2-2017
Originally Published In
PLoS Biol. 2017 May 2;15(5):e2002460. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.2002460.
Abstract
Long before bacteria infected humans, they infected amoebas, which remain a potentially important reservoir for human disease. Diverse soil amoebas including Dictyostelium and Acanthamoeba can host intracellular bacteria. Though the internal environment of free-living amoebas is similar in many ways to that of mammalian macrophages, they differ in a number of important ways, including temperature. A new study in PLOS Biology by Taylor-Mulneix et al. demonstrates that Bordetella bronchiseptica has two different gene suites that are activated depending on whether the bacterium finds itself in a hot mammalian or cool amoeba host environment. This study specifically shows that B. bronchiseptica not only inhabits amoebas but can persist and multiply through the social stage of an amoeba host, Dictyostelium discoideum.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Strassmann, Joan E. and Shu, Longfei, "Ancient bacteria–amoeba relationships and pathogenic animal bacteria" (2017). Biology Faculty Publications & Presentations. 136.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/bio_facpubs/136
Included in
Bacteriology Commons, Biology Commons, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Commons
Comments
© 2017 Strassmann, Shu. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.