Starve Acanthamoeba of oxygen, and its mitochondria do not simply shut down. Instead, the organelles retool their energy-producing machinery, enabling the amoeba to generate hydrogen gas. Acanthamoeba is a free-living, single-celled organism found in water, soil, and air. Although it rarely causes disease, it can infect the cornea and cause sight-threatening keratitis—and its metabolic flexibility may help it persist there.
That adaptability is one of several defenses that make Acanthamoeba infections difficult to eliminate. The pathogen can also retreat into a drug-resistant cyst, and the treatments available once an infection is diagnosed are limited and may damage human cells. By mapping the organism’s mitochondrial proteins, researchers now have a new way to probe the machinery behind its survival and search for more selective therapeutic targets.
“It’s a big challenge. 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,” said Jon Stefely, PhD, a metabolism investigator at the Morgridge Institute for Research and assistant professor of biomolecular chemistry at the University of Wisconsin School...