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Slime Mold-Term Paper

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Dictyostelium discoideum--also known as slime mold--is an amoeba, whose natural habitat is soil and decaying leaves found in the deciduous forest (key paper). This organism’s life cycle consists of a unicellular phase and a multicellular phase. During the unicellular phase, the amoeba feeds on bacteria and yeast, and reproduces through binary fission. Upon starvation conditions, D. discoideum amoeba collect into aggregates. Cell differentiation would occur at this point to eventually create a multicellular fruiting body. There are several factors that make D. discoideum an ideal model organism to study host-pathogen interactions. By using the amoeba, host-pathogen interactions can be observed with only the two organisms present. This is most likely not possible when higher organisms, such as C. elegans or Drosophila, are used as hosts. In …show more content…

discoideum (SOURCE). P. aeruginosa is a Gram-negative pathogen that causes life-threatening infections in people with compromised immune systems, such as those undergoing chemotherapy or those with cycstic fibrosis. The bacteria is commonly seen in nosocomial infections (hospital-acquired infections), such as pneumonia, UTIs, and sepsis. First, it was tested whether or not P. aeruginosa could infect D. discoideum. P. aeruginosa strain PA14 was grown in LB, collected through centrifugation, and resuspended in SorC buffer (16.7 mM Na2H/KH2PO4/50 microM CaCl2, pH 6.0). D. discoideum was added to the bacterial suspension to create final concentration of 500 cells/ml. 0.2 ml of the mixture was pipetted on to SM/5 plates containing 1/5 of a SM stock solution (1% glucose/1% Bacto peptone/0.1% Bacto yeast extract/4.2 mM MgSO4). As a control, D. discoideum was also plated with Klebsilla aerogenes, which was known to be non-pathogenic towards D. discoideum. This first assay showed that the strain PA14 could infect D.

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