Abstract
Dictyostelium discoideum, a soil amoeba, can be used as an alternative host to study the virulence of various bacterial species, including Pseudomonas aeruginosa. A simple quantitative test based on the ability of D. discoideum to grow on a bacterial lawn has been developed using this amoeba to assay the virulence of P. aeruginosa strains. The assay needs to be customized for the strains to be tested in order to be able to discriminate between virulent and avirulent P. aeruginosa strains. These steps are described in this protocol.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Katherine H. Tanaka and Luc Trudel for critical reading of the manuscript. We are grateful to Sok Gheck E. Tan for her assistance with the protocol. This work was funded by a Discovery grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), a Fonds de la Recherche du Québec en Santé (FRQS) grant, and a Young Researcher grant from the FRQS Réseau en santé respiratoire (RSR). S.J.C. is a research scholar of the FRQS.
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Filion, G., Charette, S.J. (2014). Assessing Pseudomonas aeruginosa Virulence Using a Nonmammalian Host: Dictyostelium discoideum . In: Filloux, A., Ramos, JL. (eds) Pseudomonas Methods and Protocols. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1149. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0473-0_51
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0473-0_51
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