To all protist colleagues: Due to my impending retirement from active research on my pet ciliate, Euplotes, I am disbursing my stocks of several Euplotes species, and one Oxytrichid. The attachment lists those strains available, and their origins and preferred (lab) foods. All are freshwater, although one (E. woodruffi) was adapted from a local brackish water collection. If anyone is interested in receiving any of these strains, please contact me (best first by phone) and I can ship them to you. I will be moving across country this spring, and do not intend to take any cells with me. Soon I will also be dispensing some of my stocks of antibodies against Euplotes cytoskeletal proteins that I have made. Monoclonals and polyclonals against PLATEIN proteins, and polyclonals against a basal body scaffold protein that I have dubbed CAGEIN (Mss in preparation). If you think these could be of use in your work, again please contact me. I don't see any way to add an attachment to this message, so I'll paste in the contents of my strain list! JK Kloetzel Euplotes stocks (December 2006) -- for distribution: 1. E. aediculatus (European strain, from France: Ammermann collection, originally, circa 1963) 2. E. aediculatus (North American strain, from Colorado: Prescott collection, Teller Lake) 3. E. woodruffi (my isolate, from the Magothy River, MD, USA; brackish water, adapted to fresh) 4. E. eurystomus (my species ID, likely correct; from Carolina Biological Co., North Carolina, USA) 5. E. muscorum (my isolate, from a potted fern plant; small encysting species) whose SSU-rDNA we recently deposited to Genbank. 6. E. octocarinatus (my isolate, from Library Lake, UMBC, Baltimore, MD, USA) The first four species are large; I feed them Tetrahymena, although they can survive fine on bacteria or on algae like Chlorogonium. The last two species are too small for Tetrahymena; they can live on bacteria, or on smaller prey such as the flagellate Chilomonas. I also have a very robust strain of an Oxytrichid, likely Sterkiella, that encysts and excysts beautifully. They also exhibit the typical behavior when food is scarce of becoming a very pleiomorphic culture -- varieties of sizes, with most cells regulating their size downward, and being consumed by their enlarging cannibal giant sisters. If interested in any of these strains, contact John Kloetzel before Feb. 2007; [log in to unmask]