In several clonally unrelated VanB-type vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium strains, we demonstrated a common physical relationship between pbp5 and Tn5382 as well as common mutations within pbp5. The majority of these strains transferred vancomycin and ampicillin resistance to E. faecium in vitro, suggesting the dissemination of similar transferable pbp5-vanB-containing mobile elements t...

In the laboratory, we documented large variation in the morphology, toxicity, and maximum population growth rates for 32 Microcystis aeruginosa strains isolated from 12 lakes. Growth rates and mean colony sizes varied significantly across strains and were positively correlated. However, growth rates were unrelated to toxin production.

A genetic transformation assay for unequivocal identification of strains of Moraxella osloensis is described. In this assay a stable tryptophan auxotroph is transformed to prototrophy by deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) samples from other strains of M. osloensis but not by DNA samples from unrelated bacteria. The test is simple to perform and definitive results can be obtained in less than 24 h. The...

Thirty-one Acinetobacter baumannii strains, comprising 14 strains from 14 outbreaks in different northwestern European cities and 17 sporadic strains, were compared by investigating various properties of the strains including biotype, antibiogram, cell envelope protein electrophoretic profile, ribotype pattern, and the band pattern generated by a novel genomic fingerprinting method, named AFLP,...

One hundred and seventy-three unrelated Listeria monocytogenes strains isolated from humans, animals, the environment, and food were analyzed for the presence of plasmids. Extrachromosomal DNA was found in 28% of the strains. Plasmid DNA was extracted more frequently from L. monocytogenes serogroup 1 strains (35%) than from serogroup 4 strains (15%). Among strains from food and the environment,...

Various genomic islands, PAPI-1, PAPI-2, PAGI-1, PAGI-2, PAGI-3, and PAGI-4, and the element pKLC102 have been characterized in different P. aeruginosa strains from diverse habitats and geographical locations. Chromosomal DNA macroarray of 100 P. aeruginosa strains isolated from 85 unrelated patients hospitalized in an intensive care unit was created to assess the occurrence of these genomic is...

Saccharomyces cerevisiae is predominantly found in association with human activities, particularly the production of alcoholic beverages. S. paradoxus, the closest known relative of S. cerevisiae, is commonly found on exudates and bark of deciduous trees and in associated soils. This has lead to the idea that S. cerevisiae is a domesticated species, specialized for the fermentation of alcoholic...

Strains of Gram-positive, catalase-positive, coagulase-negative cocci isolated from urine specimens were classified by the system of Baird-Parker (1963). Urinary infections attributed to instrumentation or pathological abnormalities of the urinary tract were caused almost entirely by various Staphylococcus subgroups. These showed a wide range of antibiotic sensitivities, unrelated to subgroups ...

The genetic basis of macrolide resistance was investigated in a collection of 48 genotypically unrelated clinical isolates of Streptococcus pneumoniae obtained between 1987 and 1997 in France. All strains were resistant to erythromycin, clindamycin, and streptogramin B, exhibiting a macrolide-lincosamide-streptogramin B resistance phenotype, and harbored the erm(B) gene. None of the strains car...

this article addresses a multi-stage flowshop scheduling problem with equal number of unrelated parallel machines. the objective is to minimize the makespan for a given set of jobs in the system. this problem class is np-hard in the strong sense, so a hybrid heuristic method for sequencing and then allocating operations of jobs to machines is developed. a number of test problems are randomly ge...