Although the study of protozoology has been active for centuries, very few current academic curricula incorporate requirements or even options for coursework on the study of protists; yet, protozoa are becoming widely recognized by investigators as organisms that play a significant role in the evolution, pathogenicity, protection and amplification of human pathogens in the environment. This is particularly true for the study of Legionella, as this accidental human pathogen has naturally evolved to infect protozoa in fresh water environments. Researchers have made great progress in the study of pathogenicity, evolution, and ecology of Legionella and its protozoan hosts, which include amoebae and ciliated protozoa. Our own collaboration in this field has been active for over a decade, and we have gained a valuable experience working with these protozoa, particularly aspects of their biology and the methods needed to address new experimental concepts. Therefore, in this chapter we provide the most effective procedures that we have developed or modified through our years of practice. We also offer notes on what procedures, in our opinion, should be avoided; and we provide the rationale for such precautions.
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Roles for RpoS in survival of Escherichia coli during protozoan predation and in reduced moisture conditions highlight its importance in soil environments.
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Microbiology, School of Natural Sciences, College of Science, National University of Ireland, Galway, Galway H91 CF50, Ireland.
The soil is a complex ecosystem where interactions between biotic and abiotic factors determine the survival and fate of microbial inhabitants of the system. Having previously shown that Escherichia coli requires the general stress response regulator, RpoS, to survive long term in soil, it was important to determine what specific conditions in this environment necessitate a functional RpoS. This study investigated the susceptibility of soil-persistent E.
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Department of Veterinary Public Health and Food Safety, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Ghent University, Salisburylaan 133, 9820 Merelbeke, Belgium. Electronic address:
Associations with free-living protozoa (FLP) have been implicated in the persistence of foodborne pathogenic bacteria in food-related environments. To date however no information is available on the presence of FLP in the gastrointestinal tract (GIT) of pigs, which represents an important reservoir for zoonotic foodborne bacteria and hence a potential location for associations with FLP. This is at least partly due to the lack of adequate protocols to recover FLP from intestinal content and feces.
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McGill University, Department of Natural Resource Sciences, Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, McGill University, Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, QC, Canada
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Department of Veterinary Public Health and Food Safety, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Ghent University, Salisburylaan 133, 9820 Merelbeke, Belgium. Electronic address:
Interactions with free-living protozoa (FLP) have been implicated in the persistence of pathogenic bacteria on food products. In order to assess the potential involvement of FLP in this contamination, detailed knowledge on their occurrence, abundance and diversity on food products is required. In the present study, enrichment and cultivation methods were used to inventory and quantify FLP on eight types of commercial vegetable sprouts (alfalfa, beetroot, cress, green pea, leek, mung bean, red cabbage and rosabi).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRelative importance of evolutionary dynamics depends on the composition of microbial predator-prey community.
ISME J
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Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, Ascot, UK.
Community dynamics are often studied in subsets of pairwise interactions. Scaling pairwise interactions back to the community level is, however, problematic because one given interaction might not reflect ecological and evolutionary outcomes of other functionally similar species interactions or capture the emergent eco-evolutionary dynamics arising only in more complex communities. Here we studied this experimentally by exposing Pseudomonas fluorescens SBW25 prey bacterium to four different protist predators (Tetrahymena pyriformis, Tetrahymena vorax, Chilomonas paramecium and Acanthamoeba polyphaga) in all possible single-predator, two-predator and four-predator communities for hundreds of prey generations covering both ecological and evolutionary timescales.
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