New tool for study bacterial killing
Phagocytosis, the ingestion of bacteria by a cell, is essential to our immune defence. This process consists of several complex phases, with the bacteria first recognised, then ingested into phagosomes and destroyed. The many players involved at each stage make phagocytosis complex to study.
K14, a compound inhibiting bacterial killing…
In their recent study in the journal Plos One, researchers from the laboratory of Prof. Pierre Cosson have discovered a new chemical compound that inhibits bacterial killing in their model of phagocytosis, the amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. K14 inhibits specifically the destruction of the bacteria within phagosomes by reducing the activity of proteases, specific enzymes involved in the degradation of the ingested bacteria.
In the absence of K14 (first line of images) the bacterium is killed after 10 minutes, whereas in the presence of K14 (second line) is still alive at 57 minutes. © Adapted from Ifrid et al. 2024 in Plos One, Figure 2
… and a new tool to study the role of proteases
These observations not only confirm the key role of proteases in bacterial destruction, but also allowed the discovery of a compound, K14, that can be used in the future to study the role of different proteases in bacterial killing and better understand the phagocytic process.