We report a fatal case of encephalitis caused by Acanthamoeba in a 24-year-old woman from India with systemic lupus erythematosus. Diagnosis was made by identification of amebas in brain sections by immunofluorescence analysis and confirmed by demonstrating Acanthamoeba mitochondrial 16S rRNA gene DNA in brain tissue sections.

Samples from therapeutic swimming pools and mud basins were cultured for free-living amoebae. Seven strains of pathogenic Naegleria species were isolated. Although some of the strains were as virulent as Naegleria fowleri, the etiological agent of primary amoebic meningoencephalitis, they were identified as Naegleria australiensis with the indirect fluorescent-antibody technique. The virulence ...

We prove new patchworking theorems for singular algebraic curves, which state the following. Given a complex toric threefold Y which is fibred over C with a reduced reducible zero fiber Y0 and other fibers Yt smooth, and given a curve C0 ⊂ Y0, the theorems provide sufficient conditions for the existence of one-parametric family of curves Ct ⊂ Yt, which induces an equisingular deformation for so...

Changes in the levels of DNA and RNA syntheses have been studied in unagitated cultures of Acanthamoeba castellanii during the phases of logarithmic multiplication (LM) and population growth deceleration (PGD). Pulse-labeling experiments show that the rate of DNA synthesis decreases at the same time that DNA per cell is known to drop by 50%. The drop in DNA content has been explained by demonst...

The rapid and frequent exchange of the 70S ribosomes in Escherichia coli, with their 50S and 30S subunits, has been established by kinetic studies and heavy isotope techniques (1-4) . While these studies were in progress, it was reported that ribosomes of Candida krusei, a eucaryote, undergo frequent exchange of ribosomal subunits (5) . It has been suggested that ribosomes dissociate and re-for...

The biochemistry of amebas is an essentially unexplored field. What studies there have been are almost exclusively concerned with Amoeba proteus and Amoeba chaos chaos, neither of which is optimally suited to most biochemical investigations for they can be grown only in relatively small quantity and must feed on another organism. Acanthamoebu sp., a soil ameba, was isolated by Neff (1) and cult...

A 42-year-old man experienced abrupt reduction of vision in the left eye and had vitreous opacity and hypopyon on initial examination. He underwent an emergency vitrectomy and phacoemulsification with posterior capsulectomy, followed by a 2-week course of intravenous fluconazole and antibiotics. The final visual acuity was 20/20 OS. Amoebas, together with polymorphonuclear cells, were observed ...

Let f be an ordinary polynomial in C[z1, . . . , zn] with no negative exponents and with no factor of the form z1 1 . . . z αn n where αi are non zero natural integers. If we assume in addition that f is a maximally sparse polynomial (that its support is equal to the set of vertices of its Newton polytope), then a complement component of the amoeba Af in R of the algebraic hypersurface Vf ⊂ (C∗...

The attachment to the surface of the ameba (Chaos chaos L. (Pelomyxa carolinensis, Wilson)) of two proteins, ribonuclease and ferritin, and two colloidal suspensions, thorium dioxide and gold, was studied in the electron microscope. The initial step in the pinocytosis of ferritin and thorium dioxide particles by amebas is shown to be the attachment of these substances to the "hairlike" extensio...