The diversity of free-living protozoa in five meat-cutting plants was determined. Light microscopy after enrichment culturing was combined with sequencing of PCR-amplified, denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE)-separated 18S rRNA gene fragments, which was used as a fast screening method. The general results of the survey showed that a protozoan community of amoebae, ciliates, and flage...

The aim of this study was to determine the presence of free-living amebae in aquatic habitats of human environments in Thailand and Hamamatsu district, Japan. Genus identification was based on the morphology of cyst and trophozoite forms and a flagellation test for genus Naegleria. The pathogenic potential was tested in mice by nasal instillation for genus Naegleria and Acanthameba. In 14 provi...

Free-ling amoebae (FLA) including Acanthamoeba spp., Naegleria fowleri, Balamuthia mandrillaris and Sappinia pedata, can cause opportunistic infections leading to severe brain pathologies. Human infections with pathogenic FLA have been increasingly documented in many countries. In Switzerland, thus far, the occurrence and distribution of potentially pathogenic FLA has not been investigated. Swi...

Mice expressing a Cre recombinase from the lysozyme M-encoding locus (Lyz2) have been widely used to dissect gene function in macrophages and neutrophils. Here, we show that while naı̈ve resident tissue macrophages from IL-4RaLysM mice almost completely lose IL-4Ra function, a large fraction of macrophages elicited by sterile inflammatory stimuli, Schistosoma mansoni eggs, or S. mansoni infectio...

Defining neurogenetic phenotypes (or how to compare needles in haystacks) Accurate diagnosis is the foundation of clinical neurology, providing both the physician and the patient with a guide to the future, hopefully leading to a treatment, and sometimes pointing towards a cure. Unlike many other clinical disciplines, the day-today practice of neurology involves a pantheon of symptoms and long ...

Multilinguality is a key feature of today’s Web, and it is this feature that we leverage and exploit in our research work at the Sapienza University of Rome’s Linguistic Computing Laboratory, which I am going to overview and showcase in this talk. I will start by presenting BabelNet 2.5 (Navigli and Ponzetto, 2012), available at http://babelnet.org, a very large multilingual encyclopedic dictio...

This case is reported with the intention of highlighting the presentation of primary intestinal amoebic disease in Heckel discus Symphysodon discus. The morphology of the parasites and the pathological changes seen using light microscopy were essential. In fresh samples of intestinal content we discovered numerous amoeba-like cells. The trophozoite measures 18.6 x 10.2 mm while the cyst is 11-2...

Over the last 20 or so years, lexicographical tasks such as finding collocations and selecting examples have been automated to some degree, both supplementing lexicographers’ intuitions with empirical data, and reducing the “drudgery” of lexicography to allow lexicographers to focus on tasks which can’t easily be automated. Automated determination of word senses and identification of usages of ...