Diagnosis: protothecosis. To determine the cause of the nodules on the patient’s hand (figure 1) and elbow (figure 2), culture of fluid obtained from the right olecranon bursa was performed and revealed Prototheca wickerhamii. A methylene blue wet mount revealed the characteristic sporangia with internal septations (figure 3). P. wickerhamii is an acrophyllic algae that is ubiquitous in nature....

Protothecosis is a rare algal infection, affecting primarily immunocompromised hosts. Optimal management is unclear: in-vitro antimicrobial breakpoints are not established and therapeutic decisions are primarily based on case reports. We present a case of cutaneous Prototheca wickerhamii infection in an immunosuppressed 63 year old male, successfully treated with liposomal amphotericin and prol...

BACKGROUND MALDI-typing has become a frequently used approach for the identification of microorganisms and recently also of invertebrates. Similarity-comparisons are usually based on single-spectral data. We apply self-organizing maps (SOM) to portray the MS-spectral data with individual resolution and to improve the typing of Prototheca algae by using meta-spectra representing prototypes of gr...

Informational genes such as those encoding rRNAs are related to transcription and translation, and are thus considered to be rarely subject to lateral gene transfer (LGT) between different organisms, compared to operational genes having metabolic functions. However, several lines of evidence have suggested or confirmed the occurrence of LGT of DNA segments encoding evolutionarily variable regio...