Polyamine content of Acanthamoeba polyphaga at different stages of development and the effect of pentamidine.

Abstract

The low molecular weight biologically active polyamines which include putrescine, spermidine and spermine are essential for cell multiplication and differentiation and in addition act as co-factors for the biosynthesis of macromolecules (Pegg and McCann, 1988). Polyamines metabolism has been studied in various organisms including the free living pathogenic amoebae, A. culbertsoni (Gupta et al., 1987) and A. castellanii (Poulin et al., 1984; Kim et al., 1987a). The polyamine contents of the free living amoebae measured at the stationary phase of the growth cycle revealed differences between strains. While Poulin et al. (1984) reported presence of only 1, 3 diaminopropane and possibly norspermidine in Neff strain of A. castellanii, spermidine and putrescine were additionally detected in A. culbertsoni (Kim et al., 1987b; Gupta et al., 1984; Srivastava and Shukla, 1982). In another report where polyamine contents of unidentified pathogenic Acanthamoeba isolates were measured in growing and quiescent cells, Zhu et al. (1989) detected relatively high levels of 1, 3 diaminopropane and spermidine in the growing cells. The polyamine levels decreased as the amoeba differentiated to cysts. N8 -acetylspermidine and acetylspermidine were found in both developmental stages while acetylcadaverine was detected only in growing amoebae and N1-acetylspermidine detected only in cysts.KeywordsTrypanosoma BruceiDiamine OxidasePolyamine MetabolismPolyamine ContentPolyamine OxidaseThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.