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...

Free living amoebae (FLA) are frequently distributed in environment, such as air, water, dust and soil (1). Some strains of Acanthamoeba spp. are non-pathogen, while others are pathogenic in immunocompromised patients or even healthy persons (2-4). Acanthamoeba encephalitis is rare and less likely to be diagnosed with successful medical intervention. These amebas can carry and transmit importan...

Albach, Richard A. (Lutheran General Hospital, Park Ridge, Ill.), James G. Shaffer, and Robert H. Watson. Morphology, antigenicity, and nucleic acid content of the Bacteroides sp. used in the culture of Entamoeba histolytica. J. Bacteriol. 90:1045-1053. 1965.-Certain changes in morphology, antigenicity, and nucleic acid content that occur in a culture of Bacteroides sp. in the presence of penic...

Let V H ðC Þ be a variety and let Log denote the logarithmic moment map Log : ðC Þ ! R, ðz1; . . . ; znÞ 7! ðlogjz1j; . . . ; logjznjÞ. The amoeba A of the variety V H ðC Þ is its image under that map. Amoebas were introduced by Gelfand, Kapranov and Zelevinsky in [6]. They show that for varieties of codimension 1, the complement A of the amoeba A in R is a disjoint union of convex regions. If ...

Balamuthia mandrillaris amoebas are recognized as a causative agent of granulomatous amoebic encephalitis, a disease that is usually fatal. They were first recognized when isolated from the brain of a mandrill baboon that died in the San Diego Zoo Wild Life Animal Park. Subsequently, the amoebas have been found in a variety of animals, including humans (young and old, immunocompromised and immu...

While Amoeba proteus has long been the subject of extensive cytological and cytochemical studies, investigations with the electron microscope have been limited principally to the nuclear membrane (1-3). The observations reported herein were made in the course of studies intended to correlate cytochemistry (4) with knowledge of fine structure obtained with the electron microscope. I t is felt th...

In an earlier study on Chaos chaos, it was found that ferritin can penetrate the nuclear membrane, the outer membrane of the mitochondrion, and the membrane lining the food vacuole, after it has been introduced into the ground cytoplasm by microinjection (1). Other work has shown that ferritin and methylated ferritin can be used to analyze the mechanism of pinocytosis in amebas and to follow so...

Helices andaggregates of helices (chromatoid bodies) composed of ribosomelike particles appear in cysts and slow-growing trophozoites of Entamoeba invadens. We found that similar helix aggregates were formed abundantly in actively growing E. invadens trophozoites treated with a variety of direct or indirect inhibitors of protein synthesis. The inhibitor-induced helices appeared cytochemically a...

The objective of the present study was to estimate the prevalence of soil-transmitted helminthiasis and evaluate the sanitary conditions and the role of a mass treatment campaign for control of these infections in Santa Isabel do Rio Negro. A cross-sectional survey was carried out in 2002, to obtain data related to the sanitary conditions of the population and fecal samples for parasitological ...

The capacity of Acanthamoeba to distinguish nutritive yeast particles from nonnutritive plastic beads during phagocytosis was investigated. When cells were allowed to phagocytose yeast to capacity, endocytosis stopped and subsequent presentation of particles (either yeast or beads) did not result in further uptake. By contrast, when cells were allowed to phagocytose plastic beads to capacity an...