This strain appeared to consist of a mixture of two variants: 4 of 20 subcultures from single colonies were coagulase-negative; the remaining 16 were coagulase-positive. The two variants differed also in respect to toxin production. The hemolytic zones produced on 5% rabbit blood agar by the coagulasenegative variant were smaller than the zones produced by the coagulase-positive one. This prope...

Linezolid, an oxazolidinone that acts by inhibiting protein synthesis, was evaluated in strains of tuberculosis and non-tubercular mycobacteria resistant to one or more drugs isolated in northern Sardinia. The in vitro activity of Linezolid (Pfizer) was assessed on different isolates of Mycobacterium spp. from clinical samples by the Proportional Method. Linezolid demonstrated an excellent acti...

Bovine tuberculosis caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium bovis is a major infectious disease of animals and has zoonotic importance for humans. Even though the incidence is believed to be very low in India, human tuberculosis caused by M. bovis has been increasingly recognized in many other countries of the world. As differentiation of mycobacterial species take long time, a method for the rap...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to comprehensively evaluate the antibacterial activity and MurE inhibition of a set of N-methyl-2-alkenyl-4-quinolones found to inhibit the growth of fast-growing mycobacteria. METHODS Using the spot culture growth inhibition assay, MICs were determined for Mycobacterium tuberculosis H(37)Rv, Mycobacterium bovis BCG and Mycobacterium smegmatis mc(2)155. MI...

Complement receptor type 3 (CR3) was initially described as an opsonic receptor. Subsequently, CR3-mediated lectin-sugar recognition mechanisms have been shown to play a major role in the nonopsonic phagocytosis of several pathogens, among them Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Little is known about the binding and signal transduction mechanisms operating during nonopsonic ingestion through CR3 of di...

Johne's disease, caused by infection with Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis, causes significant economic losses to the livestock farming industry. Improved investigative and diagnostic tools-necessary to understand disease processes and to identify subclinical infection-are much sought after. Here, we describe the production of single-chain antibodies with defined specificity for M. a...

Enzyme preparations from Mycobacterium phlei, Escherichia coli and Galium mollugo cell suspension cultures were incubated in the presence of 4-(2'-carboxyphenyl)-4-oxobutyrate (i.e. o-succinylbenzoic acid, OSB, 1), ATP, coenzyme A and Mg2+. The main product isolated from the incubation mixture was 4-(2'-carboxyphenyl)-4-oxobutyryl coenzyme A ester (2) as determined by comparison with synthetic ...