Bacterial Survival in Dictyostelium

Regin Rønn; Xiuli Hao; Freja Lüthje; Nadezhda A German; Xuanji Li; Fuyi Huang; Javan Kisaka; David Huffman; Hend A Alwathnani; Yong-Guan Zhu; Christopher Rensing

doi:10.21769/BioProtoc.2376

Bacterial Survival in Dictyostelium

Bio Protoc. 2017 Jul 5;7(13):e2376. doi: 10.21769/BioProtoc.2376.

Authors

Regin Rønn^{1

2}, Xiuli Hao², Freja Lüthje¹, Nadezhda A German³, Xuanji Li¹, Fuyi Huang², Javan Kisaka^{4

5}, David Huffman^{4

6}, Hend A Alwathnani⁷, Yong-Guan Zhu², Christopher Rensing^{2

8

9}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.
² Key Laboratory of Urban Environment and Health, Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen, China.
³ Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, Amarillo, TX, USA.
⁴ Department of Chemistry, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, USA.
⁵ Current Address: Division of Infectious Diseases, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO, USA.
⁶ Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Frederiksberg, Denmark.
⁷ Department of Botany and Microbiology, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
⁸ J. Craig Venter Institute, La Jolla, CA, USA.
⁹ Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Soil Environmental Health and Regulation, College of Resources and Environment, Fujian Agriculture & Forestry University, Fuzhou, China.

Abstract

We performed an assay to test the ability of different E. coli strains to survive inside amoebal cells after ingestion. In the assay we incubated bacteria together with cells of Dictyostelium discoideum for six hours. After co-incubation most of the uningested bacteria were removed by centrifugation and the remaining uningested bacteria were killed by gentamicin. Gentamicin is used because it does not penetrate into eukaryotic cells allowing the ingested bacteria to survive the antibiotic treatment, whereas bacteria outside the amoebal cells are killed.

Keywords: Amoebae; Bacteria; Digestion resistance; Grazing; Protists; Protozoa.