Ram2p depletion would compromise many signal transduction processes including the RAS/cAMP pathway and RHO/cell wall synthesis because Ram2p is the regulatory subunit for both
the FTase and the GGTase. A previous study demonstrated that inhibitors targeting the C. albicans GGTase showed poor antifungal activity presumably due I-BET-762 manufacturer to cross-reacting with the FTase (Kelly et al., 2000). However, compounds that inhibit Ram2p function might be potent antifungals because the defect in Ram2p function would abolish both GGTase and FTase activities. A study in C. albicans also suggested that RAM2 would be a useful antifungal target (Song & White, 2003). Thus, targeting protein prenylation as a therapeutic agent for selleck compound countering fungal infections would add to the arsenal of antifungal drugs presently available. This work was supported by a grant-in aid for scientific research from the Ministry of education, Culture, Sports and Technology, Priority Areas (‘Research Matrix of infection disease’ and ‘Applied Genomics’) in Japan. We thank Drs Masayuki Sudoh and Mikio Arisawa for sharing strains, ACG4 and ACG22, and Daiki Takemori and Makoto Okano for experimental help. “
“Streptomycin is used as a first-line defense and tetracycline as a second-line defense, in the fight against fire blight disease
in apple and pear orchards. We have performed the first study to quantitatively analyze the influence of streptomycin use in agriculture on the abundance of streptomycin and tetracycline resistance genes in apple orchards. Flowers, leaves, filipin and soil were collected from three orchard sites in 2010, 2011, and 2012. Gene abundance distribution was analyzed using two-way anova and principal component analysis to investigate relationships between gene abundance data over time and treatment. The mobile antibiotic resistance genes, strA, strB, tetB, tetM, tetW, and the insertion sequence IS1133, were detected prior to streptomycin treatment in almost all samples, indicating the natural presence of these resistance genes in
nature. Statistically significant increases in the resistance gene abundances were occasional, inconsistent, and not reproducible from one year to the next. We conclude that the application of streptomycin in these orchards was not associated with sustained increases in streptomycin or tetracycline resistance gene abundances. “
“Microplusin is an antimicrobial peptide isolated from the cattle tick Rhipicephalus (Boophilus) microplus. Its copper-chelating ability is putatively responsible for its bacteriostatic activity against Micrococcus luteus as microplusin inhibits respiration in this species, which is a copper-dependent process. Microplusin is also active against Cryptococcus neoformans (MIC50 = 0.09 μM), the etiologic agent of cryptococcosis. Here, we show that microplusin is fungistatic to C.