Effects of xenobiotic compounds on the cell activities of Euplotes crassus, a single-cell eukaryotic test organism for the study of the pollution of marine sediments

The Effects of Temperature Variation on the Sensitivity to Pesticides: a Study on the Slime Mould Dictyostelium discoideum (Protozoa)

“…The pesticides have different ways of action, affecting target proteins and ion channels or inducing general cytotoxic effects. It is known that Cd and Hg have a toxic effect via alteration of calcium flow [29,30] as well as the ability to bind the sulphhydryl groups of proteins [31], altering them, and in the case of cholinesterase, to form heavy chains of the enzyme [32]. So, the Cd and Hg effect could be related to the important role of both calcium [33] and pseudocholinesterase [12][13][14] in the developmental phases of D. discoideum.…”

“…Our work suggests considering, in future regulations, about the use of pesticides as their toxic effect on non-target organisms is strongly influenced by climate temperatures that vary from season to season and from country to country and are constantly influenced by human activity. In addition, there is need for a new consideration of the protozoa, which takes into account recent researches about the presence in this microorganism of classical neurotransmitters [13,19,32,41,42] that, similar to those in animals, make protozoa an innocent target of neurotoxic pesticides in the battle against pest crops.…”

“…The Petri dish was incubated for 360 h in a moist chamber to the temperatures of 4, 6, 8, 10,12,14,16,18,22,24,26,28,30,32 or 34°C. The Petri dishes exposed for 360 h in a moist chamber only to the temperature or only to the pesticide were utilized as controls.…”

Single-cell PCR on protargol-impregnated euplotid ciliates: a combined approach of morphological and molecular taxonomy

“…Notably, because of the sensitive response of cell activities to xenobiotic compounds, euplotids can be used as pollution indicators in aquatic ecosystems. They can similarly be used in the laboratory to determine the cellular effects of drugs in pharmacological assays, pheromone evolution in mating processes, and telomere research (Nilsson 1989;Wang et al 2002;Trielli et al 2007;Vallesi et al 2008).…”

The Effects of Pesticides on Dictyostelium Cholinesterase, from Basic to Applied Research

“…Furthermore, they can be cultured in the laboratory under conditions very similar to those in nature, making their response more reliable than that of animal-cell cultures cultured in artificial conditions (Delmonte Corrado et al, 2006). Finally, it is important to emphasise how in protozoa, the identification of molecules responsible for neurotransmission in metazoan, such as those belonging to the GABAergic system in Paramecium primaurelia (Ramoino et al, 2010) and Dictyostelium discoideum (Anjard & Loomis 2006), to the nitergic system in Paramecium primaurelia (Amaroli et al, 2010), and to the cholinergic system in Paramecium primaurelia, Dictyostelium discoideum, Euplotes crassus (Delmonte Corrado et al,1999;Amaroli et al 2003;Trielli et al, 2007), with characteristics similar to those of the vertebrates, has opened the way to their use in neurotoxicological studies. The genomal sequencing of several protozoa (Dessen et al 2001;Turkewitz et al, 2002;Eichinger et al, 2005), has demonstrated that they have conserved gene sequences compared to human genome and this has stimulated the interest of the scientific community in their use in field studies on human health, as in the case of Dictyostelium discoideum included in the eight alternative models to be used instead of vertebrates in human health studies in the USA (Williams et al, 2006).…”