HURRICANE KATRINA WAS THE MOST DEVASTATING natural disaster in US history. Large parts of New Orleans and nearby Louisiana parishes were destroyed. About 90 000 square miles of the Gulf Coast, an area roughly the size of Great Britain, was declared a federal disaster area. The often contaminated flood waters covering much of New Orleans for almost 2 months contained a mix of raw sewage, bacteri...

Staphylococcus capitis EPK1 produces a glycylglycine endopeptidase, ALE-1 (M. Sugai, T. Fujiwara, T. Akiyama, M. Ohara, H. Komatsuzawa, S. Inoue, and H. Suginaka, J. Bacteriol. 179:1193-1202, 1997), which hydrolyzes interpeptide pentaglycine chains of cell wall peptidoglycan of S. aureus. Characterizations of the enzyme activity and cloning of ale-1 revealed that ALE-1 is very similar to prolys...

To establish the method for qualitative and quantitative determination of gallic acid in Herba Gei. Gallic acid content is determined by HPLC with Diamonsil C18 column as the stationary phase, under the conditions of methanol-0.1% phosphoric acid in water (10:90) mobile phase, 271 nm detection wavelength, and 40°C column temperature. Peak area of gallic acid shows a good linearity with the inje...

We determined the in vitro activity of SMT19969 and 11 comparators, including metronidazole, vancomycin, and fidaxomicin, against 107 C. difficile isolates of different antimicrobial resistance phenotypes. Fidaxomicin and SMT19969 were the most active. The fidaxomicin and SMT19969 geometric mean MICs were highest in ribotypes known to show multiple resistance. Coresistance to linezolid and moxi...