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A non-mammalian system to study bacterial infections.

ALTEX 24, Special Issue 2007 78 Fig. 1: A Dictyostelium amoeba eating bacteria. Pathogenic bacteria often use the same mechanisms to defend themselves against unicellular amoebae and to infect mammalian animals. Consequently unicellular amoebae offer an alternative system to study pathogenic bacteria. This system could reduce significantly the need to use mammals to study pathogenic bacteria. Background and aim In the study of bacterial infectious diseases and in the development of new drugs, it is very often essential to test a bacteria’s capability to cause a disease. To initiate such a situation, it is necessary to infect a host, typically a mouse, and allow the disease to progress. We are working on a new system where mice are replaced by a non-mammalian host: Dictyostelium discoideum, a soil amoeba. Very similar results are obtained in this system and in mammalian hosts. We now want to extend these results to validate this system as an alternative to mammalian models.