Antibiotic therapy of infections caused by the emerging pathogen Mycobacterium abscessus is challenging due to the organism's natural resistance toward most clinically available antimicrobials. We investigated the bactericidal activity of antibiotics commonly administered in M. abscessus infections in order to better understand the poor therapeutic outcome. Time-kill curves were generated for c...

The action of aminoglycoside antibiotics is inhibited by chemical modification catalyzed by aminoglycoside inactivating enzymes, which bind these cationic saccharides with active site pockets that contain a preponderance of negatively charged residues. In this study, it was observed that several cationic antimicrobial peptides, representing different structural classes, could serve as inhibitor...

Aminoglycoside N-acetyltransferases (AACs) confer resistance against the clinical use of aminoglycoside antibiotics. The origin of AACs can be traced to environmental microbial species representing a vast reservoir for new and emerging resistance enzymes, which are currently undercharacterized. Here, we performed detailed structural characterization and functional analyses of four metagenomic A...

Antibiotic resistance is recognized as a growing healthcare problem. To address this issue, one strategy is to thwart the causal mechanism using an adjuvant in partner with the antibiotic. Aminoglycosides are a class of clinically important antibiotics used for the treatment of serious infections. Their usefulness has been compromised predominantly due to drug inactivation by aminoglycoside-mod...

Background & objective: Multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii (MDR-AB) is an important nosocomial pathogen which is associated with significant morbidity and mortality, particularly in high-risk populations. Aminoglycoside-modifying enzymes (AMEs) and 16S ribosomal RNA (16S rRNA) methylation are two important mechanisms of resistance to ...

Bacillus circulans NRRL B-3312 produces the aminoglycoside antibiotic butirosin and encodes an aminoglycoside 3'-phosphotransferase. We detected a 48 kilobase plasmid, pIP850, in this strain; this was analyzed by agarose gel electrophoresis following digestion with EcoRI restriction endonuclease and by nucleic acid hybridization. The results obtained indicate that plasmid pIP850 does not carry ...