Filippo Pacini (25 May 1812 – 9 July 1883) was an Italian anatomist, posthumously famous for isolating the cholera bacterium Vibrio cholerae in 1854, well before Robert Koch's more widely accepted discoveries 30 years later.
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👉 Filippo Pacini in the context of Vibrio cholerae
Vibrio cholerae is a species of Gram-negative, facultative anaerobe and comma-shaped bacteria. The bacteria naturally live in brackish or saltwater where they attach themselves easily to the chitin-containing shells of crabs, shrimp, and other shellfish. Some strains of V. cholerae are pathogenic to humans and cause a deadly disease called cholera, which can be derived from the consumption of undercooked or raw marine life species or drinking contaminated water.
V. cholerae was first described by Félix-Archimède Pouchet in 1849 as some kind of protozoa. Filippo Pacini correctly identified it as a bacterium and from him, the scientific name is adopted. The bacterium as the cause of cholera was discovered by Robert Koch in 1884. Sambhu Nath De isolated the cholera toxin and demonstrated the toxin as the cause of cholera in 1959.
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Filippo Pacini in the context of Vibrio
Vibrio is a genus of Gram-negative bacteria, which have a characteristic curved-rod (comma) shape, several species of which can cause foodborne infection or soft-tissue infection called Vibriosis. Infection is commonly associated with eating undercooked seafood. Being highly salt tolerant and unable to survive in freshwater, Vibrio spp. are commonly found in various salt water environments. Vibrio spp. are facultative anaerobes that test positive for oxidase and do not form spores. All members of the genus are motile. They are able to have polar or lateral flagellum with or without sheaths. Vibrio species typically possess two chromosomes, which is unusual for bacteria. Each chromosome has a distinct and independent origin of replication, and are conserved together over time in the genus. Recent phylogenies have been constructed based on a suite of genes (multilocus sequence analysis).
O. F. Müller (1773, 1786) described eight species of the genus Vibrio (included in Infusoria), three of which were spirilliforms. Some of the other species are today assigned to eukaryote taxa, e.g., to the euglenoid Peranema or to the diatom Bacillaria. However, Vibrio Müller, 1773 became regarded as the name of a zoological genus, and the name of the bacterial genus became Vibrio Pacini, 1854. Filippo Pacini isolated micro-organisms he called "vibrions" from cholera patients in 1854, because of their motility. In Latin "vibrio" means "to quiver".