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Southeast Asian J Trop Med Public Health,
2006]
We are reporting a case of an eye lesion caused by an adult Brugia malayi. The patient was a 3-year-old Chinese boy from Kemaman District, Terengganu, Peninsular Malaysia. He presented with a one week history of redness and palpebral swelling of his right eye. He claimed that he could see a worm in his right eye beneath the conjunctiva. He had no history of traveling overseas and the family kept dogs at home. He was referred from Kemaman Hospital to the eye clinic of Hospital Tengku Ampuan Afzan, Kuantan, Pahang, Malaysia. On examination by the ophthalmologist, he was found to have a subconjunctival worm in his right eye. Full blood count revealed eosinophilia (10%). Four worm fragments, each about 1 cm long were removed from his right eye under general anesthesia. A thick blood smear stained with Giemsa was positive for microfilariae of Brugia malayi. A Brugia Rapid test done was positive. He was treated with diethylcarbamazine.
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Curr Biol,
2004]
Jonathan Hodgkin graduated from Oxford in 1971 and then did a PhD with Sydney Brenner at MRC LMB in Cambridge, studying behavioural genetics in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Later, after a couple of years working with myxobacteria as a postdoc in Dale Kaiser''s lab at Stanford, he returned to LMB as a staff member, where he remained for most of the subsequent two decades. In the year 2000, he moved to Oxford as Professor of Genetics in the Department of Biochemistry, switching his major research interests from developmental genetics and sex determination to the study of host-pathogen interactions in the worm. For the past ten years, he has acted as curator of the C. elegans genetic map and gene nomenclature, and he is currently President of the Genetics Society of Great Britain.
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[
Genetics,
2015]
Ellsworth Dougherty (1921-1965) was a man of impressive intellectual dimensions and interests; in a relatively short career he contributed enormously as researcher and scholar to the biological knowledge base for selection of Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism in neurobiology, genetics, and molecular biology. He helped guide the choice of strains that were eventually used, and, in particular, he developed the methodology and understanding for the nutrition and axenic culture of nematodes and other organisms. Dougherty insisted upon a concise terminology for culture techniques and coined descriptive neologisms that were justified by their linguistic roots. Among other contributions, he refined the classification system for the Protista.
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Nature,
1997]
Who scapes the lurking sepent's mortal sting? Not he that sets his foot upon her back. Even the smallest of worms will turn, when trodden on.
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Worm Breeder's Gazette,
1992]
EXPRESSION AND LOCALIZATION OF THE cha-l AND
unc-17 GENE PRODUCTS He-ping Han, Janet Duerr, and Jim Rand, Oklahoma Medlcal Research Foundation, Oklahoma Clty, OK 73104
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[
The New York Times,
1997]
His tall figure bent over a computer screen in his laboratory at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Gary Ruvkun rummages through a distant genetic data base for matches to a gene he believes is involved in diabetes. ?You learn how to read these as they are ratcheting by,? he says, while lines of data streak up his screen. ?I think MTV is good training.?
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Cell,
2002]
In 1963, Sydney Brenner, one of the founders of molecular biology, had reached an intellectual impasse. He felt that there were few advances left in that field that would have the significance of the discovery of mRNA and the elucidation of the genetic code, both of which he had participated in, and in any case with so many Americans joining in, the chemical details of replication and so forth would all be worked out soon. Brenner thought large thoughts, and the questions that were left seemed too
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Journal of Helminthology,
1955]
Osche (1952) has recently published a sorely needed, comprehensive revision of the genus Rhabditis Dujardin [1844] (sensu lato) including detailed study of certain features of the cephalic end, especially of the stoma or mouth cavity. For some time to come his study will surely be the point of departure for morpholigical and systematic work on the group. On the basis principally of the structure of the metastom (a subdivision of the stoma) and of the esophagus, he recognizes some eight subgenera in the genus Rhabditis, which are as follows: Rhabditis Dujardin [1844] (sensu stricto), Choriorhabditis Osche, 1952, Telorhabditis Osche, 1952, Caenorhabditis Osche, 1952, Mesorhabditis Osche, 1952, Teratorhabditis Oshce, 1952, Protorhabditis Osche, 1952, and Parasitorhabditis Fuch, 1937. For all of these save the last he lists the species recognized by him. For a revision of Parasitorhabditis he refers to an unpublished manuscript by Ruhm.....
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Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club,
1946]
In 1874 Lohde briefly described a hyphomycete that he found growing parasitically on numerous eelworms belonging to a species of Anguillula. To this hyphomycete he applied the binomial Harposporium Anguillulae; the generic term then presented for the first time having reference to the crescentically curved, sickle-shaped conidia which the fungus produced terminally on delicate sterigmata arising singley from peculiar round protuberances formed laterally on the hyphal branches or hyphal prolongations that were extended from the multicellular mycelial filaments, from 2 to 4 in number, passing through the animals body....
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J Vis Exp,
2010]
American Biologist Martin Chalfie shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Roger Tsien and Osamu Shimomura for their discovery and development of the Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP). Martin Chalfie was born in Chicago in 1947 and grew up in Skokie Illinois. Although he had an interest in science from a young age--learning the names of the planets and reading books about dinosaurs--his journey to a career in biological science was circuitous. In high school, Chalfie enjoyed his AP Chemistry course, but his other science courses did not make much of an impression on him, and he began his undergraduate studies at Harvard uncertain of what he wanted to study. Eventually he did choose to major in Biochemistry, and during the summer between his sophomore and junior years, he joined Klaus Weber's lab and began his first real research project, studying the active site of the enzyme aspartate transcarbamylase. Unfortunately, none of the experiments he performed in Weber's lab worked, and Chalfie came to the conclusion that research was not for him. Following graduation in 1969, he was hired as a teacher Hamden Hall Country Day School in Connecticut where he taught high school chemistry, algebra, and social sciences for 2 years. After his first year of teaching, he decided to give research another try. He took a summer job in Jose Zadunaisky's lab at Yale, studying chloride transport in the frog retina. Chalfie enjoyed this experience a great deal, and having gained confidence in his own scientific abilities, he applied to graduate school at Harvard, where he joined the Physiology department in 1972 and studied norepinephrine synthesis and secretion under Bob Pearlman. His interest in working on C. elegans led him to post doc with Sydney Brenner, at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. In 1982 he was offered position at Columbia University. When Chalfie first heard about GFP at a research seminar given by Paul Brehm in 1989, his lab was studying genes involved in the development and function of touch-sensitive cells in C. elegans. He immediately became very excited about the idea of expressing the fluorescent protein in the nematode, hoping to figure out where the genes were expressed in the live organism. At the time, all methods of examining localization, such as antibody staining or in situ hybridization, required fixation of the tissue or cells, revealing the location of proteins only at fixed points in time. In September 1992, after obtaining GFP DNA from Douglas Prasher, Chalfie asked his rotation student, Ghia Euskirchen to express GFP in E. coli, unaware that several other labs were also trying to express the protein, without success. Chalfie and Euskirchen used PCR to amplify only the coding sequence of GFP, which they placed in an expression vector and expressed in E.coli. Because of her engineering background, Euskirchen knew that the microscope in the Chalfie lab was not good enough to use for this type of experiment, so she captured images of green bacteria using the microscope from her former engineering lab. This work demonstrated that GFP fluorescence requires no component other than GFP itself. In fact, the difficulty that other labs had encountered stemmed from their use of restriction enzyme digestions for subcloning, which brought along an extra sequence that prevented GFP's fluorescent expression. Following Euskirchen's successful expression in E. coli, Chalfie's technician Yuan Tu went on to express GFP in C. elegans, and Chalfie published the findings in Science in 1994. Through the study of C. elegans and GFP, Chalfie feels there is an important lesson to be learned about the importance basic research. Though there has been a recent push for clinically-relevant or patent-producing (translational) research, Chalfie warns that taking this approach alone is a mistake, given how "woefully little" we know about biology. He points out the vast expanse of the unknowns in biology, noting that important discoveries such as GFP are very frequently made through basic research using a diverse set of model organisms. Indeed, the study of GFP bioluminescence did not originally have a direct application to human health. Our understanding of it, however, has led to a wide array of clinically-relevant discoveries and developments. Chalfie believes we should not limit ourselves: "We should be a little freer and investigate things in different directions, and be a little bit awed by what we're going to find."