Despite the concern of replacement disease, notably by serotype 19A after 7-valent conjugate vaccine (PCV7) use, serotype 19A was increasingly recognized in Korean children before the introduction of PCV7. To understand the dynamics of serogroup 19 prevalence from 1991-2006, we serotyped 538 pediatric pneumococcal isolates. Serogroup 19 isolates (n = 126) were characterized by antimicrobial dru...

A total of 3,205 group A streptoccal isolates were collected in 1997 through a private laboratory which serves community physicians in southern Ontario and which represents a population base of 6 million people. Nonsusceptibility to erythromycin was detected for 67 (2.1%) isolates both by disk diffusion and by broth microdilution. Of these, 47 (70%) were susceptible to clindamycin and were foun...

Background: Development of drug resistance to Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) has led to the use of older antibiotics such as macrolide-lincosamide-streptogramin B (MLSB) for the treatment of infections. MLSB resistance can be caused by several mechanisms, however, one of the predominant reasons is target modification mediated by erm gene...

During cefoxitin-based nasal screening, phenotypically categorized methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) was isolated and tested negative for the presence of the mecA and mecC genes as well as for the SCCmec-orfX junction region. The isolate was found to carry a mecB gene previously described for Macrococcus caseolyticus but not for staphylococcal species. The gene is flanked by β-...

BACKGROUND Streptococcus pneumoniae is a major human pathogen. The emergence of penicillin resistant strains since the 1970s has been life threatening and the evolution of the bacteria have enabled itself to develop resistance to many other antibiotics such as the macrolides and the fluoroquinolones. This study aims to characterize S. pneumoniae isolates for the presence of penicillin and macro...

In bacteria, ribosome stalling during translation of ErmBL leader peptide occurs in the presence of the antibiotic erythromycin and leads to induction of expression of the downstream macrolide resistance methyltransferase ErmB. The lack of structures of drug-dependent stalled ribosome complexes (SRCs) has limited our mechanistic understanding of this regulatory process. Here we present a cryo-e...