Wednesday, July 25, 2018

Next ICOPA in Copenhagen?

As mentioned last month, the Copenhagen team is SO much hoping to be elected as hosts of the next ICOPA (International Congress on Parasitology).
To be chosen as the host, we need ***VOTES*** from the member societies of World Federation of Parasitologists. If for some reason your member society is not represented at this year's ICOPA in Daegu, South Korea, please note that you can vote by proxy.


http://sbsp.eu/images/PDF/ICOPAnhagen_2022_mini_web.pdf
http://icopaxv.dk/documents.html
World Federation of Parasitologists
Wonderful Copenhagen
@ICOPAnhagen2022
#ICOPAnhagen

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

Updates on 2nd International Blastocystis Conference

Three months until kick-off of 2nd International Blastocystis Conference in Bogotá!

A couple of updates:

  • Abstract submission deadline has been postponed to 15th of August 2018
  • We have had a couple of speaker cancellations. Drs Pauline Scanland and Katerina Pomajbikova will not be able to participate. Hopefully, we'll be blessed by their presence at the next big Blasto event. Instead, Drs Raul Tito-Tadeo and Hisao Yoshikawa have very kindly accepted to give keynote lectures and lead workshop sessions. And so we will still have a great event!
For more information on workshop and conference, please visit the official conference website here.

Since it's summer here in Europe, and since I love Phlox, I thought, I'd attach a couple of images that I received yesterday from my dear friend Jaco Verweij.


Tuesday, July 3, 2018

Experimental models for Blastocystis research - new paper out!

Experimental models are critical to advancing our knowledge on the role of Blastocystis in health and disease.

We have now published our work led by Dr Katerina Pomajbikova on the suitability of the rat as a model of Blastocystis colonisation. We observed that the rats were able to sustain the colonisation for more than one year, when a ST1 strain isolated from a human was used.

Next step could now be to monitor gut microbiota before and after challenge with Blastocystis cysts and look for changes at both individual and community level,, changes in alpha and beta diversity, etc.

The paper is free for download here until August 19, 2018.