Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) is an important cause of hospital diarrhea. Conventional CDI testing by enzyme immunoassays is fast yet shows poor sensitivity and specificity, whereas the ‘gold standard’ toxigenic culture is laborious and time consuming. Molecular tests for CDI are fast and highly sensitive and specific. Our laboratory has developed a molecular procedure that allows for r...

Plastic laboratory materials are found to affect vital parameters of the waterflea Daphnia magna. The main responsible factor is defined as "newness" of the materials. Juvenile D. magna were raised individually in; a) new laboratory-standard 50 ml polypropylene tubes, and; b) identical tubes which had been washed and aerated for several weeks. Newness had significant effects on growth and fecun...

The ecological risk assessment of pesticides is generally based on toxicity data obtained from single-species laboratory experiments and does not take into account ecological interactions such as competition or predation. Intraspecific and interspecific competition are expected to result in additional stress and might increase the sensitivity of aquatic populations to pesticide contamination. T...

The aquatic ecotoxic profile of the fungicide pyrimethanil and its acute and chronic thermal dependence in two aquatic invertebrates Chironomus riparius and Daphnia magna were investigated. The ecotoxicity of pyrimethanil at optimal thermal conditions did not depend on the trophic level, but was species-specific. The acute pyrimethanil-toxicity on C. riparius increased with higher temperature. ...

While the commercialization of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) is rapidly expanding, the environmental impact of this nanomaterial is not well understood. Therefore, the present study evaluates the acute aquatic toxicity of SWCNTs towards two freshwater microalgae (Raphidocelis subcapitata and Chlorella vulgaris), a microcrustacean (Daphnia magna), and a fish (Oryzias latipes) based on ...

OBJECTIVES An ecofriendly alternative to chemical pesticides is bio-pesticides, which are derived from natural sources. The interest in bio-pesticides is based on the disadvantages associated with chemical pesticides. METHODS We conducted acute toxicity assessments of camphor, a major component of bio-pesticides, by using Daphnia magna (D. magna) as well as assessed the morphological abnormal...

We show that Daphnia magna can be used to assess acute virulence of pathogens relevant to human health, such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa or Photorhabdus asymbiotica. Analysis of bacterial mutants suggests that P. aeruginosa uses similar mechanisms to infect Daphnia and other hosts.

Extinction is ubiquitous in natural systems and the ultimate fate of all biological populations. However, the factors that contribute to population extinction are still poorly understood, particularly genetic diversity and composition. A laboratory experiment was conducted to examine the influences of environmental variation and genotype diversity on persistence in experimental Daphnia magna po...

The objective of this study was to compare the MagNA Pure 96 Pathogen Universal protocol to the MagNA Pure LC DNA Isolation Kit III that is well established in our microbiological laboratory. For this we isolated nucleic acids from ten different sample materials: body fl uids (CSF, urine, sputum), feces, swabs, as well as whole blood, EDTA-, Citrate-plasma and serum. This spectrum is typical fo...

The re-emergence of schistosomiasis has given rise to ubiquitous concentrations of the primary control agent pentachlorophenol (PCP) in the environment, especially in the surface waters of China. In this study, the effects of environmentally relevant concentrations of PCP, namely, 0.0002, 0.002, 0.02, 0.2, and 2 μmol/L on survival, age at first reproduction, fecundity, length of mothers, and nu...