Amoeba eat bacteria and other human pathogens, engulfing and destroying them - or being destroyed by them, but how these single-cell organisms distinguish and respond successfully to different bacterial classes has been largely unexplained. In a report in the journal Current Biology, researchers from Baylor College of Medicine use the model of the social amoeba - Dictyostelium discoideum - to identify the genetic controls on how the amoeba differentiate the different bacteria and respond to achieve their goal of destruction...

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