To the Editor: Alveolar proteinosis (AP) is a rare disease which affects the lungs diffusely and is characterized by the deposition of protein-like material rich in phospholipids. This material is characteristically PAS positive and does not cause interstitial alveolar inflammation; thus the degree of fibrosis minimal. Signs and symptoms are nonspecific and patients are generally asymptomatic b...

The fatty acid constituents of 14 species of Mycobacterium (14 isolates) and one isolate each of Corynebacterium xerosis, Nocardia asteroides, and Streptomyces albus were examined with the purpose of distinguishing Mycobacterium tuberculosis from other acid-fast bacilli. Combined thin-layer chromatography (TLC) of methyl mycolates and gas-liquid chromatography (GLC) of shorter-chain fatty acid ...

New drugs to treat drug-resistant tuberculosis are urgently needed. Extensively drug-resistant and probably the totally drug-resistant tuberculosis strains are resistant to fluoroquinolones like moxifloxacin, which target gyrase A, and most people infected with these strains die within a year. In this study, we found that a novel aminobenzimidazole, VXc-486, which targets gyrase B, potently inh...

UNLABELLED MycoProtease-DB is an online MS SQL and CGI-PERL driven relational database that domiciles protease information of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) complex and Nontuberculous Mycobacteria (NTM), whose complete genome sequence is available. Our effort is to provide comprehensive information on proteases of 5 strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (H(37)Rv, H(37)Ra, CDC1551, F11 and KZN...

BACKGROUND A prospective observational study was done to describe nonbacterial pulmonary complications in hospitalized patients with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. METHODS The study included 1,225 consecutive hospital admissions of 599 HIV-infected patients treated from April 1995 through March 1998. Data included demographics, risk factors for HIV infection, Acute Physiology a...

Mycolyl-transferases are a family of proteins that are specifically present in the CMN (Corynebacterium, Mycobacterium and Nocardia) genera and are responsible for the synthesis of cell wall components. We modeled the three-dimensional structures of mycolyl-transfersases from Corynebacterium and Nocardia using homology modeling methods based on the crystal structures of mycolyl-transferases fro...

Sixteen strains designated Mycobacterium farcinogenes, fifteen Mycobacterium senegalense, and ten Nocardia farcinica were, together with strains of Mycobacterium and Nocardia, subjected to numerical phenetic analyses using 96 unit characters. The data were examined using the simple matching (SSM), Jaccard (SJ) and pattern (DP) coefficients and clustering achieved using the unweighted average li...

One-tube nested PCR was developed for diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis using sequences based on thel6SrRNA gene. The usage of primers 16SOL, 16SOR, 16SIL and 16SIR with optimized conditions could detect 555 bp DNA band from 21 species, 41 strains of mycobacteria and one isolate of Nocardia asteroides. It also revealed a specific 306 bp DNA band from 59 strains of M. tuberculosis complex. Cro...

background and objectives: mycobacterium tuberculosis complex is consisted of homogenous organisms. they are slowly growing mycobacteria and their isolation and identification are difficult and time consuming. differentiation of mycobacterium bovis, causative mammalian tuberculosis, from other members of mycobacterium tuberculosis complex is very important in epidemiology and control of disease...