BACKGROUND Acinetobacter baumannii is one of the major causes of nosocomial infections and is resistant to most available antibiotics. Aminoglycosides remain as drugs of choice for treatment of Acinetobacter infections yet resistance to aminoglycosides has increased in the recent years. OBJECTIVES The present study investigated the prevalence of genes encoding aminoglycoside-modifying enzymes...

Aminoglycosides are a group of antibiotics used since the 1940s to primarily treat a broad spectrum of bacterial infections. The primary resistance mechanism against these antibiotics is enzymatic modification by aminoglycoside-modifying enzymes that are divided into acetyl-transferases, phosphotransferases, and nucleotidyltransferases. To overcome this problem, new semisynthetic aminoglycoside...

We modified the phosphocellulose binding assay for aminoglycoside-modifying enzymes (AMEs) by use of microdilution plates and a multichannel micropipette. Batteries of aminoglycoside substrates for screening organisms for the presence of AMEs as well as for subclassifying enzymes were prepared and stored in microdilution plates. When tested in parallel with the conventional tube reaction assay,...

Enzymatic modification of aminoglycosides by nucleotidyltransferases, acetyltransferases and/or phosphotransferases accounts for the majority of aminoglycoside-resistant Acinetobacter isolates. In this study, we investigated the relationship between aminoglycoside resistance and the presence of aminoglycoside-modifying enzymes in Acinetobacter baumannii clinical isolate groups with different re...

Ten isolates of Streptococcus faecalis and two isolates of S. faecium were studied together with an NCTC strain of each species. Antibiotic susceptibility tests showed different patterns of high-level resistance to aminoglycosides. Three S. faecalis strains were highly resistant to gentamicin and other aminoglycosides. By means of a filter membrane technique, transfer of high-level resistance t...