Publications by authors named "Flavia R Brust"

We describe substantial variant diversity among 23 detected SARS-CoV-2 Omicron lineage viruses cocirculating among healthcare workers and inpatients (272 sequenced samples) from Porto Alegre, Brazil, during November 2022-January 2023. BQ.1 and related lineages (61.

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Metabolomics strategies are important tools to get holistic chemical information from a system, but they are scarcely applied to endophytic fungi to understand their chemical profiles of biosynthesized metabolites. Here sp. was cultured using One Strain Many Compounds (OSMAC) conditions as a model system to demonstrate how this strategy can help in understanding metabolic profiles and determining bioactive metabolites with the application of metabolomics and statistical analyses, as well as molecular networking.

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Objective: To describe the evolution of seropositivity in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, through 10 consecutive surveys conducted between April 2020 and April 2021.

Methods: Nine cities covering all regions of the State were studied, 500 households in each city. One resident in each household was randomly selected for testing.

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Cholesterol is a known precursor of arthropod molecules such as the hormone 20-hydroxyecdysone and the antimicrobial boophiline, a component of tick egg wax coat. Because the cholesterol biosynthetic pathway is absent in ticks, it is necessarily obtained from the blood meal, in a still poorly understood process. In contrast, dietary cholesterol absorption is better studied in insects, and many proteins are involved in its metabolism, including Niemann-Pick C (NPC) transporter and acyl-CoA:cholesterol acyltransferase (ACAT), as well as enzymes to convert between free cholesterol and esterified cholesterol.

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Staphylococcus aureus is an opportunistic pathogen involved in several human diseases and presents ability to produce many virulence factors and resistance to antibacterial agents. One of the current strategies to combat such multidrug resistant bacteria is the antibacterial combination therapy. Myricetin is a flavonoid capable of inhibiting several S.

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Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a major public health concern representing about 60% of S. aureus isolated from hospitalized patients in countries such as USA and Brazil in the last years. Additionally, the ability to adhere to surfaces and the development of biofilms are important properties of pathogenic bacteria involved in medical device-associated infections, and staphylococci are recognized as the major etiologic agents in these situations.

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Article Synopsis
  • In vivo studies are essential to move from lab data (in vitro) to actual treatments, and this research presents a straightforward method for assessing biofilm growth in Galleria mellonella larvae.
  • Toothbrush bristles were used to simulate a medical device, and Staphylococcus aureus was injected into the larvae to study biofilm formation.
  • The method successfully quantified bacterial colonies and confirmed biofilm presence, while ensuring no contamination in control groups, making it a valuable tool for testing antibiofilm therapies in the future.
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Essential oils, mixtures of volatile compounds, are targets of research for new antimicrobial drugs. In order to verify the potential from species of the Nectandra genus, the present study evaluated the essential oils from Nectandra amazonum, Nectandra cuspidata, Nectandra gardineri, Nectandra hihua and Nectandra megapotamica to prospect samples with high concentration of a component and its antibacterial, antibiofilm and anti-Trichomonas vaginalis activities. The essential oils from the leaves and barks were extracted by steam distillation and analyzed by gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (GC-MS).

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  • The study examines the virulence and antibiotic resistance of subpopulations from NDM-1 producing clinical isolates of Enterobacteriaceae, focusing on their ability to form biofilm and susceptibility to antibiotics.
  • Different subpopulations from the same macrocolony exhibited varying levels of biofilm production and resistance to meropenem, linked to the loss of encoding plasmid.
  • In vitro testing revealed that a combination of meropenem-rifampicin-polymyxin B was synergistic against all subpopulations, but in vivo results showed varying effectiveness, highlighting the complexity of treating multidrug-resistant infections.
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In this study, essential oil extracted from Syagrus coronata seeds (SCEO) was evaluated for antibacterial and antibiofilm activities against Staphylococcus aureus; in addition, Galleria mellonella model was used as an in vivo infection model. SCEO was mainly composed by fatty acids (89.79%) and sesquiterpenes (8.

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The biological activities and the structural arrangement of adevonin, a novel antimicrobial peptide, were investigated. The trypsin inhibitor ApTI, isolated from Adenanthera pavonina seeds, was used as a template for screening 18-amino acid peptides with predicted antimicrobial activity. Adevonin presented antimicrobial activity and minimum inhibitory concentrations (MIC) ranging from 1.

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This study determined the prevalence of metallo-beta-lactamase (MBL)-producing Pseudomonas aeruginosa in two hospitals located in the Southern part of Brazil and compare the performance of two different phenotypic tests. Thirty-one non-repetitive Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolates from various clinical samples from patients admitted to two hospitals located in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil (twenty-three from a hospital in Porto Alegre City and eight isolates from a hospital in Vale dos Sinos Region). All strains suggestive of possessing MBLs by phenotypic methods were included in this study.

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