This Month In Blastocystis Research (SEP 2013)

This month has been extremely busy, and I've been preoccupied with networking, meetings and conferences.

I want to thank the arrangers of the Scandinavian-Baltic Society for Parasitology (SBSP) meeting (which was this year merged with The 8th European Congress of Tropical Medicine & Tropical Medicine)  for arranging a conference session on 'Intestinal Protists - Diagnostic Tools and Emerging Trends', which I was very honoured to chair. One of the four talks was unfortunately cancelled, but the rest of the talks were centred on Blastocystis, and due to great speakers and a very engaged and experienced audience, it turned out to be an extremely interesting and awarding session, sporting topics such as in-vitro susceptibility testing, subtype distribution in different cohorts, diagnostics, and 'Blastomics' advances. The conference took place in the Tivoli Congress Center in Copenhagen. Excellent facilities, but apparently catering other than tap water, tea + coffee could not be accommodated in the congress budget; but then again, it was a big meeting with more than 1,000 people registered (unconfirmed). Anyway, I look forward to more meetings and symposia focusing on Blastocystis! For more on this, stay tuned!

PubMed-wise there is not really much to include in the 'This Month in Blastocystis Research' series though, and I think I'll skip it this time. However, for those with an insatiable appetite for scientific papers on Blastocystis, I have very good news: The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Online Research Library, which can be accessed here, apparently offers free download of accepted papers (i.e. the original files accepted by the various journals and not the printed versions). A search on Blastocystis renders about 25 publications (not of all of which are specifically on Blastocystis, though), so there should be plenty to read...

Thanks to our excellent librarian here at the SSI, my entertainment for the weekend will be 'Studies on Human Intestinal Protozoa' published in Acta Medica Scandinavica (Supplementum LXX) in 1935 by Ruth Svensson - her doctoral thesis dedicated to Dr Clifford Dobell...

Recent Developments in Blastocystis Research

I would like to draw your attention to an open access link to our 2013 review on Recent Developments in Blastocystis Research; please go here to read/download the paper.

Here's the abstract:

Blastocystis is a common parasite of the human large intestine but has an uncertain role in disease. In this review, we appraise the published evidence addressing this and its weaknesses. Genetic diversity studies have led to the identification of numerous subtypes (STs) within the genus Blastocystis and, recently, methods for studying variation within STs have been developed, with implications for our understanding of host specificity. The geographic distribution of STs is summarised and the impact this may have on investigations into the role of the organism in disease is discussed. Finally, we describe the organelle and nuclear genome characteristics and look to future developments in the field.