Photographs

The fascinating story of the ubiquitous mycobacteria and their never-ending threat to human and animal health comes to a close with the following set of photographs. Both the breadth and depth of material on mycobacteria are illustrated with the short captions and links to relevant chapters of this book are provided. Readers should be aware that all photos were taken as working documents for laboratory and travel reports over the last three decades. This chapter therefore does not have the aim of representing issues relating to mycobacteria as a set of “artistic photos.” Rather, the intention of the authors was to summarize the story by showing at least some of environments where mycobacteria survive or thrive, often posing risks to other inhabitants of the habitat, including invertebrates, amphibians, fish or mammals, and even humans. The history of mycobacteria begins thousands of years ago, long before some of the species were recognized as pathogens and from ancient times they represent a permanent health risk to animals and humans. The scientific description of mycobacteria has a much shorter history. Two papers cited in this book appeared in 1875 and since that time thousands more have been published. The methods used in mycobacterial research have developed from simple observation, microscopy, culture, experiments on animals and case studies to the use of sophisticated instruments, applied in electron and confocal microscopy, liquid culture with automatic mycobacterial growth detection, radioisotope techniques, genetics, immunology, molecular biology, genomics, proteomics, etc.