Naegleria is a common soil amoeba — the sequenced organism was isolated from the mud in a grove of eucalyptus trees on the UC Berkeley campus — that, under stress, quickly grows two flagella, like sperm tails, that it uses to swim around. It has a third identity, a hard cyst, that can persist in the soil until conditions become damp and warm enough for it to turn into an amoeba.“This one-celled organism hunts and eats bacteria as an amoeba, swims around looking for a better environment as a flagellate, and then hunkers down and waits for good times as a cyst,” Prochnik said. “It is a very rare process to go from amoeba to flagellate like this.”
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