This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: 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 keratitis. The lack of readily available diagnostics is a problem, and then even after you finally get to the diagnosis, we don't have good drugs," says Dr.
Jon Stefely, now a metabolism investigator at the Morgridge Institute for Research and assistant professor of biomolecular chemistry at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. "Our current drugs are untargeted and toxic, and we just need more options for treating these infections." Stefely is the first author of two new studies about Acanthamoeba in the journals Cell and Cell Press Blue—part of a set of nine papers published concurrently by the MitoCarta Tree of Life Consortium. The broader project aims to create an inventory of mitochondrial proteins across all branches of the tree of life and, in doing so, learn more about evolutionary history and the last common ancestor of all animals, plants, fungi and protists, which lived about 2 billion years ago.
The MitoCarta project was conceived by Dr. Vamsi Mootha, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Stefely completed work on his two first-author papers while a postdoctoral researcher in Mootha's lab.
Previously, the MitoCarta project had cataloged a mammalian mitochondrial proteome inventory, noting all the proteins involved in the mitochondria of mammalian cells. The new set of papers adds proteome inventories to divergent branches of the tree of life by intentionally selecting pathogenic organisms, like Acanthamoeba, from across the tree. This strategy has the added benefit of potentially leading to new drugs to treat those pathogens.
Acanthamoeba keratitis is in particular need of new treatments because, in harsh environments like a human cornea, the amoeba builds a thick, double-layered protective cell wall somewhat like those found in trees and other plants. In this cyst form, Acanthamoeba is hardy and resistant to currently available drugs. The team hoped that by understanding the genes and proteins involved in mitochondrial function, they could find targets for highly specialized drugs that aren't toxic to humans.
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