Habitat: From normal and diseased mice so far as known. 11. INIycoplasnia gullinariini Freundt, 1955. (A pleuropneumonia-like organism iso- lated from the upper respiratory tract of a fowl, Edward, Jour. Gen. Microbiol., 10, 1954, 52 and 53; Freundt, Internat. Bull, of Bact. Nomen. and Taxon., 5, 1955, 73; Borrelomyces (jaUinarum Freundt, ibid., 75.) gal.li.na'rum. L. fem.n. gallina a hen; L. fem.gen.pl.n. gallinarum of hens. Morphological characters not recorded for the type strain (cf. Comments) . Gram-nega- tive. Horse-serum agar: A film and spots are produced. Horse-blood agar: Hemolysis. Rabbit-serum agar: Good growth. Semi-solid media: Smooth growth throughout. No acid from glucose. Methylene blue is reduced rather rapidly. Aerobic, facultatively anaerobic. Pathogenicity: Not tested for the repre- sentative strain. Comments: The coccobacillary bodies of fowl coryza described by Nelson were prob- ably pleuropneumonia-like organisms (Nel- son, Science, 82, 1935, 43; also see Jour. Exp. Med., 63, 1936, 509 and 515; and ibid., 69, 1939, 199). Herick and Eaton (Jour. Bact., 50, 1945, 47) isolated a pleuropneumonia-like organism as a contaminant of a pneumonia virus which was being passaged in chick embryos; broth cultures agglutinated chicken erythrocj^tes as well as those of other animals; hemagglutination inhibition tests with sera of chickens from the hatchery that had furnished the eggs showed an ap- preciable antibody level to the organism in a fairly high percentage of the chickens. Re- port of pleuropneumonia-like organisms from egg-passage material of the agent (s) of a chronic respiratory disease (CRD) of chickens and of turkey sinusitis (TS), which were originally regarded as viruses by van Roekel, Olesiuk and Peck (Amer. Jour. Vet. Res., 13, 1952, 252), was made by Markham and Wong (Poult. Sci., 31 , 1952, 902) ; follow- ing a series of thirteen successive subcul- tures in artificial media, the organisms pro- duced mortality and microscopic findings in embryonated eggs that were typical for the above agents, and suspensions prepared from yolk sacs harvested from these em- l)ryos caused sinusitis in turkeys. Lecce and Sperling (Vet. Ext. Quart., Univ. of Pennsylvania, No. 134, 1954, 96) were able to cultivate pleuropneumonia-like organ- isms from the tracheae of chickens which had long since recovered from symptoms of CRD and from asymptomatic chickens that had been in contact with sick birds, but they were not able to cultivate these organisms from normal birds obtained from flocks that had never been associated with CRD. They also showed (Cornell Vet., U, 1954, 441) that pleuropneumonia-like organisms were more commonly found in the tracheae than in the lungs and air sacs of sick chickens. White, Wallace and Alberts (Poult. Sci., S3, 1954, 500) studied two strains of the CRD agent and one strain of the TS agent ob- tained from van Roekel. Broth cultures from the 22nd serial transfer in an artificial medium were inoculated into the infraorbi- tal sinuses and into the tracheae of 10-week- old chickens and turkeys. The latter de- veloped sinusitis 9 to 12 days after exposure, and at necropsy performed one month after exposure, tracheitis and signs of inflamma- tion of the thoracic and abdominal air sacs were demonstrated. In the chickens, a catar- rhal inflammation of the nasal membranes and tracheae was observed, while there were no external symptoms of sinusitis and no gross pathological changes in the air sacs. Hemagglutination tests with broth cultures and chicken and turkey erythrocytes were positive and were inhibited both by homol- ogous and heterologous sera of the infected birds. Sera from apparently normal birds showed a slight inhibition. Structures simi- lar to those characteristic of the pleuro- pneumonia group were demonstrated in electron micrographs prepared from broth cultures: single elementary bodies varying from 0.1 to 0.5 micron, and large and small filaments, some of which contained close-set spherical bodies that were about the size of single cells. Strains from chickens and turkeys could not be distinguished morpho-
