Phagocytosis of microbes: insights and prospects

one. For the adventurous in spirit, it combines the thrill of the chase with the capture and speedy demise of the villain. Computer buffs will find in the plasma membrane the cell’s motherboard, coordinating the flow of information from ligated surface receptors to the cell’s metabolic and motile machinery. Science fiction devotees will revel as invading microbial pathogens evade the cell’s outer defences and win the day by striking at a station along the endocytic pathway. The laid-back of all ages will appreciate the many ways prokaryotesform life-long, sometimes symbiotic, associations with the cells that phagocytose them. For cell biologists, the capacity of a bacterial or protozoan pathogen to affect a unique target in a higher eukaryotic cell is an opportunity to identify and probe otherwise undetectable regulatory pathways. Thatsome of these palhways are conserved in organisms whose evolutionary paths diverged millions of years ago (e.g. Legionella pneumophila forms similar r ibosome-studded vacuoles in fresh-water amoebae’ and in human macrophages’), indicates that lessons learned from lower eukaryotes (such as those described by Jeon in this issue) will be relevant to solving current problems of microbial pathogenesis and understanding pathways of host resistance (see for example Harding, and Selsted and Ouellette, this issue).