实验基础

Campylobacters are the most frequently identified cause of acute bacterial diarrhea in humans in England and in many other developed countries. Although C jejuni and C coli are numerically the most important species in cases of campylobacter enteritis, there is a growing awareness that so ...

Although most Escherichia coli are harmless commensals of the human intestine, certain specific, highly-adapted E. coli strains are capable of causing urinary tract, systemic or enteric/diarrheagenic infection. Diarrheagenic E coli are divided into six distinct categories, or p ...

Few diseases invoke public fear as readily as cholera. In its most severe state, cholera can cause death from hypotensive shock within 12 h of the first symptom. Cholera typically occurs in epidemics, spreading rapidly within the community, especially if hygeinic conditions are poor. Fortun ...

Disease caused by any member of the genus Salmonella is termed salmonellosis. The type of disease and its symptoms are generally related to the mfecting species and reflect the invasiveness and virulence of the organism. For example, enteric fevers are systemic diseases usually resulting ...

Organisms of the class Mollicutes (meaning soft-skin) have regressively evolved, by genome reduction, from Gram-positive bacterial ancestors, namely certain clostria (1). The taxonomy of the class Mollicutes, containing four orders, five familes, and eight genera, is shown in Table 1 ( ...

Chancroid is a genital ulcerative disease GUD). These diseases are common throughout the world and include syphilis, genital herpes, chancroid, lymphogranuloma venereum, and donovanosis. Chancroid is particularly common an Africa, Asia, and Latin America where its incidence may e ...

Gonorrhea is a major sexually transmitted disease (STD) that occurs worldwide. The prevalence has fallen dramatically in most industrialized countries in the last ten years because of effective therapy, contact tracing, and changes in sexual practices since the advent of the Acquired I ...

Neisseria meningitidis, the meningococcus, is normally a harmless commensal bacterium that colonises the naso/oropharynx of humans. This antigenically variable gram-negative diplococcus has the potential, however, to cause rapidly progressing meningitis and fulmina ...

The speciesHaemophilus influenzae belongs to the genus Haemophilus and the family Pasteurellaceae. H influenzae are small, nonmotile, nonspore forming, Gram-negative, pleomorphic rods that range in shape from coccobacilli to long filaments. They require X and V factors (hemin and ...

The Legionnaires’ Disease (LD) Bacillus was first recognized following a large outbreak of pneumonia at a convention of American military veterans in 1976 (1). In the context of other microbial infections, this is a relatively recent event. Since then, considerable progress has been made in t ...

Prior to the late 1980s diphtheria was regarded in many countries as one of “those rare and forgotten” diseases associated with the preimmunization era of the 1940s. Despite the success of many immunization programs, there is still much to be learned about this disease that has made a dramatic “ret ...

Bacteria may need to be characterized for a number of reasons. Newly discovered organisms are characterized to determine their taxonomic position; clinical isolates are characterized to provide an indication of pathogenic potential and likely antibiotic susceptibility. Such ...

The genus Mycobacterium consists of a diverse group of organisms that are ubiquitous and are believed to be some of the oldest bacteria on earth. They may exist as free-living commensals inhabiting soil and water, but they are also potentially pathogenic to man and other animals, being transmitt ...

The pneumococcus is now the most important bacterial pathogen causing pneumonia, meningitis, and otitis media. Traditional approaches to the diagnosis of Streptococcus pneumoniae as the etrologic agent causing these diseases include colony morphology, microscopy, optoch ...

The ability to identify rapidly organisms to the species, and at times subspecies level, is an important step in the treatment of bacterial infections and for monitoring the spread of microorganisms. Conventional identification of streptococci relies on the isolation and culturing of ...

Several families of short repetitive DNA sequences, widely distributed in the genome, have been identified in bacteria (1). They have an intercistronic location, are not translated, and their function is unclear, although they may be involved in transcription termination, mRNA stabil ...

The impact of molecular (nucleic acid-based) methods on the basic science of medical microbiology is undeniable. Indeed, microbiologists have been at the forefront of the molecular biology revolution that has had such a dramatic effect on our understanding of biological science. Alth ...

Pseudotype viruses are phenotypically mixed virions containing the genome or nucleocapsid of one enveloped virus and the surface or envelope (env) glycoproteins of another. This chapter will concentrate on vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) pseudotypes retaining the VSV nucleo ...

Viral-specific antibodies of any class that bind to particular epitopes on the surface protein of a virion are capable of neutralizing the infectivity of the virion. Classical neutralization results when antibody binds to the virion and thereby prevents infection of a susceptible cell. ...

Investigation of the biological activity of viruses in vitro necessitates some means of identifying their presence within cells and assaying their activity. Since virus particles themselves are metabolically inert, their detection and quantitation is dependent on their cellu ...