TraitMech

TraitMech › PHYSIOLOGY

trogocytosis

traitmech:000633 · CLASS · PROPOSED

A physiological phenotype in which a microbial organism removes and takes up discrete portions of another living cell during direct contact instead of engulfing that cell whole.

Trait evidence (2)

  • DOI:10.1038/nature13242
    amoebae kill by ingesting distinct pieces of living human cells

    PMID:24717428, PMC4006097. Direct scientific Abstract quote from the final Nature/PubMed version, not the differently worded PMC author-manuscript Summary. Author-manuscript Results and Discussion, relevant imaging and cell-culture Methods, and actual Figures 1-2 were inspected at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4006097/. Uptake precedes target-cell death; attachment alone is not uptake. Internalization and fragmentation gates are distinct measurements. Other figures and movies were not visually audited. No universal killing threshold, nutritional benefit or complete protein mechanism is inferred.

  • DOI:10.1128/mBio.00068-19
    Protection from human serum occurs only after amoebae have undergone trogocytosis of live cells but not phagocytosis of dead cells.

    PMID:31040235, PMC6495370. Direct scientific Abstract quote, not the separate Importance/precis block. Cell-culture Methods, membrane-display and live/dead-cell Results, Discussion, and actual Figures 1, 6 and 8 were inspected at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6495370/. Figure 6B measures the percentage of internalizing amoebae, not material mass per cell. Figure 8 is a proposed model, not direct proof of a membrane-fusion or trafficking route. Other figures and supplements were not visually audited. Serum protection is condition-specific, not definitional.

Provenance

Identifier source
TraitMech local identifier
Definition source
DOI:10.1038/nature13242

Parent traits (1)

kg-microbe context

No kg-microbe node embedding matched this record in the 2026-04-25 deepwalk.

Canonical examples (1)

Organisms cited as exemplars of this trait. Taxon ids are NCBITaxon and link out to the NCBI record.

  • Entamoeba histolytica NCBITaxon:5759 DOI:10.1128/mBio.00068-19 Strain-qualified HM1:IMSS parental trophozoites interacting with live Jurkat cells in the 2019 study, not engineered knockdowns, vector controls or every isolate. Cell-culture Methods name ATCC as the supplier, without a catalog or lot number. The matching HM-1:IMSS collection record at https://www.atcc.org/products/30459 documents natural clinical isolation from a colonic biopsy; it does not establish an exact study lot or clone. NCBI ESearch/EFetch verified the scientific name and species rank on 2026-10-06. This taxon ID is species-level, not strain-level.

Discussions and Knowledge Gaps (2)

Open questions attached to this trait. Seeded by just knowledge-gap-scan and curated; see the corpus-wide index.

Keep cell nibbling distinct from nutrition and whole-cell uptake.

CURATION TODO OPEN trogocytosis-scope-and-hierarchy · raised by codex · 2026-10-06

Not yet attached to a section of this record — a curator sets attaches_to (e.g. causal_graphs#some_edge) so the gap shows beside the mechanism it concerns.

This record concerns the microbe as the nibbling organism, not host immune-cell attack on a microbe. Retain phenotype METPO:1000059 pending a closer uptake hierarchy. Local phagocytosis traitmech:000627 covers particle enclosure and internalization; phagotrophy traitmech:000628 requires nutrient assimilation. Myzocytosis traitmech:000631 denotes prey-content aspiration through a localized connection, and pallium feeding traitmech:000632 involves an enveloping feeding veil. None is asserted equivalent or disjoint at organism level. The existing myzocytosis contrast is not an unresolved exact trogocytosis node. Neither nutrition, killing, serum protection, a human target nor a fixed fragment size is a class requirement. Free-particle uptake or attachment alone is insufficient. No unverified synonym or process-level xref is asserted.

Resolve native molecular mechanisms without universalizing dependencies.

KNOWLEDGE GAP OPEN trogocytosis-native-mechanism · raised by codex · 2026-10-06

Not yet attached to a section of this record — a curator sets attaches_to (e.g. causal_graphs#some_edge) so the gap shows beside the mechanism it concerns.

The two papers are distinct experiments from an overlapping research group, not independent taxon replication. Perturbation, localization and sequence similarity are different evidence types. Neither a conceptual model nor a homologous sequence establishes a universal pathway. Inspect the remaining figures and obtain taxon-paired functional and accession evidence before adding protein examples or a causal graph.

Curation history

  1. · MINTED_TRAITMECH_ID · codex

    Added trogocytosis with two DOI-backed scientific-abstract snippets and an HM1:IMSS-qualified example. Ignored-and-hidden novelty searches and pinned METPO review found no exact record. Reserved METPO:1058600 in v509. Kept nutrition, killing and serum protection out of the definition and deferred unsupported protein mechanisms.