Ciliates are highly complex single-cell organisms, yet very successful from evolutionary point of view they emerged eon years ago and derived into many thousands of known species. Robustness may have an essential contribution to their survival. In this paper, we discuss the robustness of ciliates gene assembly, a process that transforms a diploid micronucleus to a macronucleus and involves mass...

We prove that a reversible model for the guided homologous recom-binations that take place during gene rearrangement in ciliates has the computational power of a Turing machine, the accepted formal model of computation. This indicates that, in principle, these unicellular organisms may have the capacity to perform any computation carried out by an electronic computer. 1 Gene unscrambling as com...

Differentiation involves the expression of certain latent cellular characteristics and the repression of others. A new study has revealed how Paramecium uses short RNAs to delete information from the somatic genome of one of its two sexes.

Ciliates have been reported as pathogens of many species of economically important bivalves. Mussel protozoan X (MPX), is an uncharacterised intracellular ciliate of mussels and has been widely reported in Mytilus spp. around the world. In order to characterise this ciliate, Mytilus edulis samples were collected from a site on the West coast of Scotland, and four different fixatives for histolo...

In order to realize the ecological specialty of man-made lake located in urban area in South China, species composition, dominant species dynamics and other parameters of ciliate community were investigated with the qualitative and quantitative observations from April of 2009 to March of 2010, in Dongshan Lake, a subtropical shallow urban lake in South China. The relationship between the parame...

Aerobic activated sludge granules are dense, spherical biofilms which can strongly improve purification efficiency and sludge settling in wastewater treatment processes. In this study, the structure and development of different granule types were analyzed. Biofilm samples originated from lab-scale sequencing batch reactors which were operated with malthouse, brewery, and artificial wastewater. ...

Most data available from Paramecium, fewer from Tetrahymena, disclose essentially the same principles of signaling as in metazoans up to man. Microtubules serve for long-range signaling, whereas SNARE proteins, H-ATPase, GTPases and actin provide short-range molecular signals, with Ca as a most efficient, locally and spatially restricted signal particularly for membrane fusion. This is enabled ...

Differential decreases over time of two bacterial species, Escherichia coli and Enterococcus faecalis, in a freshwater and a marine ecosystem were observed and explained by a differential rate of digestion of these bacteria by phagotrophic flagellates and ciliates. For this purpose, fluorescence-labeled bacteria (FLB) were used and prepared from the two species cited above. The number of FLB wa...

Abstract Copepods of the genera Calanus and Pseudocalanus are important components Arctic marine ecosystems. Despite key roles these zooplankters, little is known about organisms they interact with most intimately, their parasites symbionts. We applied metabarcode sequencing to uncover eukaryotic present within two copepod from three areas around high archipelago Svalbard. Ten distinct parasite...