ArticleBiology letters2019
Phagocyte chase behaviours: discrimination between Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria by amoebae.
Article in Biology letters, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Predation in microbial communities: gradients of nutritive killing.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2026Review
- Chemotaxis and selective interactions ofbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Light Affects Host-Symbiont Dynamics in the Non-Photosynthetic Social Amoeba Symbiosis.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Pleiotropic regulation of bacterial toxin production and Allee effect govern microbial predator-prey interactions.ISME communications · 2025Article
- Protist size-dependent shifts of bacterial communities can reduce litter decomposition.ISME communications · 2025Article
- Conceptualizing soil fauna effects on labile and stabilized soil organic matter.Nature communications · 2024Review
- Costs of being a diet generalist for the protist predatorProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Perspective: The viscoelastic properties of biofilm infections and mechanical interactions with phagocytic immune cells.Frontiers in cellular and infection microbiology · 2023Review
- Complexities of Inferring Symbiont Function:Applied and environmental microbiology · 2022Article
- Symbiont-Induced Phagosome Changes Rather than Extracellular Discrimination Contribute to the Formation of Social Amoeba Farming Symbiosis.Microbiology spectrum · 2022Article
- Environmental Free-Living Amoebae Can Predate on Diverse Antibiotic-Resistant Human Pathogens.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2021Article
- The Ecology and Evolution of Amoeba-Bacterium Interactions.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2021Review
- Phagocyte chase behaviours: discrimination between Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria by amoebae.Biology letters · 2019Article
- Life Cycle Plasticity of Colpoda aspera Fed With Petroleum Tolerant Gram-Positive and Gram-Negative Bacteria.The Journal of eukaryotic microbiologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Phagocytes are cells that pursue, engulf and kill bacteria. They include macrophages and neutrophils of the mammalian immune system, as well as free-living amoebae that hunt and engulf bacteria for food. Phagocytosis can result in diverse outcomes, ranging from sustenance to infection and colonization by either pathogens or beneficial symbionts-and thus, discrimination may be necessary to seek out good bacteria while avoiding bad ones. Here we tested whether the soil amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum can discriminate among different types of bacteria using behavioural assays where amoebae were presented with paired choices of different bacteria. We observed variation in the extent to which the amoebae pursued different types of bacteria, as well as preferential migration towards Gram-negative compared with Gram-positive bacteria. Response profiles were similar for amoebae that originated from different geographical locations, suggesting that chase preference is conserved across much of the species range. While prior work has demonstrated that bacteria use chemotaxis to seek out amoebae they colonize, our work suggests that the opposite also occurs-amoebae can preferentially direct themselves to particular bacteria in the environment. Preferential sensing and response may help to explain why some amoeba-bacteria associations are more common in nature than others.
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