ArticleBiometals : an international journal on the role of metal ions in biology, biochemistry, and medicine2017
Bacterial resistance to arsenic protects against protist killing.
Article in Biometals : an international journal on the role of metal ions in biology, biochemistry, and medicine, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 23 citations in OpenAlex.
- Adaptive evolution ofMicrobial genomics · 2026Article
- The Microbial Trojan Horse and Antimicrobial Resistance: Acanthamoeba as an Environmental Reservoir for Multidrug Resistant Bacteria.Environmental microbiology · 2025Article
- Comparative analysis of three plasmids fromJAC-antimicrobial resistance · 2024Article
- Phagotrophic protists preserve antibiotic-resistant opportunistic human pathogens in the vegetable phyllosphere.ISME communications · 2023Article
- Bifunctional protein ArsRBMC microbiology · 2023Article
- Recent advances in exploring the heavy metal(loid) resistant microbiome.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2021Review
- Unravelling the antibiotic and heavy metal resistome of a chronically polluted soil.3 Biotech · 2020Article
- Distribution of Arsenic Resistance Genes in Prokaryotes.Frontiers in microbiology · 2018Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors at 7 institutions in 6 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Protists kill their bacterial prey using toxic metals such as copper. Here we hypothesize that the metalloid arsenic has a similar role. To test this hypothesis, we examined intracellular survival of Escherichia coli (E. coli) in the amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum (D. discoideum). Deletion of the E. coli ars operon led to significantly lower intracellular survival compared to wild type E. coli. This suggests that protists use arsenic to poison bacterial cells in the phagosome, similar to their use of copper. In response to copper and arsenic poisoning by protists, there is selection for acquisition of arsenic and copper resistance genes in the bacterial prey to avoid killing. In agreement with this hypothesis, both copper and arsenic resistance determinants are widespread in many bacterial taxa and environments, and they are often found together on plasmids. A role for heavy metals and arsenic in the ancient predator-prey relationship between protists and bacteria could explain the widespread presence of metal resistance determinants in pristine environments.
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Registered trials
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