Amoeba builds barriers for protection against bacteria

In some respects, animals and amoebae are not that different. For instance, both are at risk of potentially deadly attacks by bacteria and have evolved ways to prevent them. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine report ...

Bacterial infection makes farmers out of amoebae

In 2011 the Queller-Strassmann lab, then at Rice University, made a startling announcement in Nature Letters. They had been collecting single-celled amoebae of the species Dictyostelium discoideum from the soil in Virginia ...

Understanding how cells follow electric fields

Many living things can respond to electric fields, either moving or using them to detect prey or enemies. Weak electric fields may be important growth and development, and in wound healing: it's known that one of the signals ...

Genes define the interaction of social amoeba and bacteria

Amoeba eat bacteria and other human pathogens, engulfing and destroying them – or being destroyed by them, but how these single-cell organisms distinguish and respond successfully to different bacterial classes has been ...

Cheating slime mold gets the upper hand

A 'cheater' mutation (chtB) in Dictyostelium discoideum, a free living slime mould able to co-operate as social organism when food is scarce, allows the cheater strain to exploit its social partner, finds a new study published ...

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