actinomyces

actinomyces (plural actinomyces)

1. A bacterium (species) of the genus Actinomyces.
   • 1902, Transactions of the Medical Society of the State of New York, page 375:

     Very often the actinomyces are mixed with some other microorganism, the growth of which is more vigorous, and tends to obscure the actinomyces.

   • 1992, Frank Ryan, Tuberculosis: The Greatest Story Never Told : the Human Story of the Search for the Cure for Tuberculosis and the New Global Threat, →ISBN, page 215:

     He soon became expert enough to spot an actinomyces colony at a glance. For Albert Schatz, the quest for the wonder microbe in this chaos of nature owed more to intuition than any systematic scientific search. "If you ask me why I picked one colony of actinomyces over another, I cannot tell you. There was no rationale for picking one colony of an actinomyces over another. Naturally if a plate had five colonies which morphologically and grossly looked alike, I would not pick all five."

   • 2003, Piet Lens, Biofilms in Medicine, Industry and Environmental Biotechnology: Characteristics, Analysis and Control, →ISBN, page 40:

     An sspAB double mutant was generated and the resulting effects were additive; however, it retained a single previously unrecognized lactose-inhibitable coaggregation with an actinomyces coaggregation group D representative (Figure 3.3, cognate symbol complementary to gray rectangle).

   • 2007, D. A. Hopwood, Streptomyces in Nature and Medicine: The Antibiotic Makers (→ISBN), page 22:

     Waksman wrote in his autobiography:

     " It is the first attempt that has ever been made to grow an actinomyces on a large scale, to attempt to utilize an actinomyces for any practical purpose, or even to find any use whatsoever for this obscure group of micro-organisms."

     Unfortunately, the initial excitement did not last long: actinomycin certainly killed the pathogens, but it killed laboratory animals too. Woodruff pressed on