Disruption of Protozoa by Indole and Related Compounds

Abstract

THE disruption of protozoa in saturated aqueous indole solutions, first described by Eadie and Oxford¹, has been used in the preparation of enzyme extracts from rumen protozoa² and ribosomes from Tetrahymena³. This type of biochemical disruption is of interest not only because of its spectacular nature but also because it is selective for rumen protozoa and any associated bacteria are not broken². In examining the disruptive effect of other compounds Eadie and Oxford¹ confined themselves largely to those closely related to indole and skatole (see Table 1). They concluded that, while a fairly close relationship to the tryptophan structure might be important, the primary requisites for disruption were “slight water solubility with ready lipoid solubility and the absence of any strongly polar centre in the molecule”. We have now examined the disruptive action of a much wider range of compounds on both ruman protozoa and Tetrahymena in order to test these conclusions.