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Glycerol With Fetal Calf Serum - A Better Cryoprotectant For Blastocystis Hominis, Init Ithoi

Init Ithoi

In recent years, a growing number of reports have sug- gested that the protozoan parasite, Blastocystis hominis (Brumpt 1912), is a pathogenic cause of diarrhoea. It is imperative, however, that more studies are conducted on the various human isolates of the parasite before in- criminating it is a pathogen. In our laboratory we maintain human and animal isolates of Blastocystis using the monophasic medium Iscove's Modi®ed Dul- becco Medium (IMDM) as established by Ho et al. (1993), but maintaining continuous cultures is tedious, time consuming and expensive, and the parasites may be prone to genetic drift. There is therefore a …