The Lung parasite “Pokemonas bacteria”
Research team of Cologne University has discovered previously undescribed bacteria in amoebae that are related to Legionella and will even cause disease. The researchers from Professor Dr. Michael Bonkowski’s working party at the Institute of Zoology have named one among the newly discovered bacteria “Pokemonas” because they sleep in spherical amoebae, like Pokémon within the video game, which are caught in balls. Results of their research are published within the journal Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology.
Bacterial order Legionellales have long been of scientific interest because a number of these bacteria are known to cause lung disease in humans and animals e.g Legionnaires’ disease, which is caused by the species Legionella pneumophila. Legionellales bacteria live and multiply as intracellular parasites within the organism’s cell as hosts. Specifically , hosts of Legionellales are amoebae. The term “amoeba” is used to describe microorganisms variety that are not closely related, but share a variable shape and crawling locomotion by means of pseudopods.
We wanted to screen amoebae for Legionellales and choose a amoebae gaggle for our research that had no close relationship to the hosts that were previously studied. The choice fell on the amoeba group Thecofilosea, which is usually overlooked by researchers,’ explains Marcel Dominik Solbach.
And undeniably, the spherical Thecofilosea function host organisms for Legionellales. In These amoebae from environmental samples, the scientists were able to detect various Legionellales species, including two previously undescribed genera and one undescribed species from the genus Legionella.
“The results show that the range of known host organisms of these bacteria is considerably wider than previously thought. In addition, these findings suggest that a lot of more amoebae may function hosts for Legionellales — and thus potentially as vectors of disease. To investigate this further, we are now sequencing the entire genome of those bacteria,” said Dr. Kenneth Dumack, who led the project.
In the future, these new findings should help to raised understand how Legionellales bacteria are related amongst one another , and clarify their interactions with their hosts also because the routes of infection so as to stop outbreaks of the diseases in humans.
