Book Description

The human body is constantly faced with microorganisms. Most of these bacteria, fungi, and viruses are harmless, many of them are beneficial, and a small fraction is pathogenic. For humans, infection with pathogenic microorganisms can be very serious or even fatal, ranging from mild transient or chronic infections to death. The first line of defence against pathogens is our innate immune system. Beside chemical and physical defence mechanisms of the innate immune system, phagocytic cells such as macrophages play a crucial role in the fight against pathogenic microorganisms. However, phagocytic cells and pathogens are in a constant evolutionary arms race, inventing new strategies to successfully kill pathogens and learning how to resist phagocytosis and intracellular killing, respectively. If pathogens are not obligatory adapted to the human body or other animals, they also have to face environmental phagocytes in the form of amoebae. Many aspects of phagocytosis and intracellular killing are surprisingly well conserved between amoebae and macrophages. Therefore, pathogens that have evolved with environmental amoebae as their “training grounds” can also be successful during infection of macrophages and other animal phagocytic cells. In this Research Topic, we provide the latest knowledge about the potential of using amoebae as host models to study the interaction with pathogens. The Research Topic covers the interaction of amoebae with bacteria, fungi, and viruses and also illustrates the similarities and differences between amoebae and macrophages. Investigation of evolutionary conserved pathways of amoebae and macrophages furthers our understanding of the biology of host-pathogen interactions and helps to develop new anti-infection therapies.