Eye-eating amoeba resists treatment—understanding its biochemistry could help
In water, soil and air all around us lives a free-living, single-celled organism called Acanthamoeba. Most of the time, Acanthamoeba keeps to itself. On rare occasions, though, the amoeba infects humans and can cause severe infections of the eyes, skin and even the brain. What's more, doctors can struggle to diagnose and treat the eye infection caused by the organism, called Acanthamoeba…
Acanthamoeba, a single-celled organism encountered in water, soil, and air, can infect humans and result in severe, difficult-to-diagnose and treat eye infections. Dr. Jon Stefely, a metabolism investigator at the Morgridge Institute for Research, emphasizes the challenge of diagnosing and treating Acanthamoeba keratitis due to the lack of readily available diagnostics and existing drugs that are untargeted and toxic.
The MitoCarta Tree of Life Consortium, led by Dr. Vamsi Mootha, aims to create an inventory of mitochondrial proteins across all branches of the tree of life, including pathogenic organisms like Acanthamoeba, to learn more about evolutionary history and discover new drugs. The researchers used long-read RNA sequencing to improve the accuracy of Acanthamoeba genome annotation to 98%.
They identified over 16,000 genes, with about a third being unique to the amoeba compared to humans and yeast. Additionally, Acanthamoeba mitochondria have a unique ability to switch functions between oxygen-rich and oxygen-deprived conditions, which may help the amoebae survive in harsh environments like a human cornea.
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