Thursday 2 April 2015

There isn't a magic bacterial bullet

A new paper by Rachael E. Antwis and coauthors ("Amphibian symbiotic bacteria do not show universal ability to inhibit growth of the global pandemic lineage of Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis") shows that Bd mitigation using probiotics may be more complicated than currently thought. The study shows that "only a small proportion of candidate probiotics exhibit broad-spectrum inhibition across BdGPL isolates. Moreover, some bacterial genera show significantly greater inhibition than others, but overall, genus and species are not particularly reliable predictors of inhibitory capabilities."

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