Efficacy of a mobile lithotripsy service: a one-year review of 222 patients.

Objective: Extracorporeal shockwave lithotripsy (ESWL) is the management of choice for ureteric and renal stones 20 mm or smaller, with a stone clearance rate of up to 89%. This study determined whether such a high success rate could apply to centres using mobile ESWL, by reviewing the performance at one centre that provides such a service.

Material And Methods: Between July 2011 and July 2012, 222 patients (median age 51 years, range 18-90 years) underwent one to five sessions of ESWL for ureteric and renal stones (mean size 15 mm, range 4-22 mm).

Inactivation of the mycobacterial rhamnosyltransferase, which is needed for the formation of the arabinogalactan-peptidoglycan linker, leads to irreversible loss of viability.

Temperature-sensitive mutant 2-20/32 of Mycobacterium smegmatis mc(2)155 was isolated and genetically complemented with a Mycobacterium tuberculosis H37Rv DNA fragment that contained a single open reading frame. This open reading frame is designated Rv3265c in the M. tuberculosis H37Rv genome.

Cysteinyl-tRNA(Cys) formation in Methanocaldococcus jannaschii: the mechanism is still unknown.

Most organisms form Cys-tRNA(Cys), an essential component for protein synthesis, through the action of cysteinyl-tRNA synthetase (CysRS). However, the genomes of Methanocaldococcus jannaschii, Methanothermobacter thermautotrophicus, and Methanopyrus kandleri do not contain a recognizable cysS gene encoding CysRS. It was reported that M.

Regulated expression of the Escherichia coli lepB gene as a tool for cellular testing of antimicrobial compounds that inhibit signal peptidase I in vitro.

Escherichia coli under-expressing lepB was utilized to test cellular inhibition of signal peptidase I (SPase). For the construction of a lepB regulatable strain, the E. coli lepB gene was cloned into pBAD, with expression dependent on L-arabinose.

The protein synthesis inhibitors, oxazolidinones and chloramphenicol, cause extensive translational inaccuracy in vivo.

The oxazolidinone family is a new class of synthetic antibiotics that bind to the bacterial 50S ribosomal subunit. Two members of the family, linezolid and XA043, were examined for their effects on translational fidelity using a lacZ reporter gene in vivo. Both promoted highly significant frameshifting and nonsense suppression.

The role of dynamic modelling in understanding the microbial contribution to rumen function.

Mechanistic models of microbial metabolism in the rumen aim at an improved understanding and integration for research purposes or at an improved prediction for practical purposes. The standard way of representing such models is the rate : state formalism. The system is defined by a number of state variables and a set of differential equations describe the change of the state variables with time.

An array of target-specific screening strains for antibacterial discovery.

As the global threat of drug- and antibiotic-resistant bacteria continues to rise, new strategies are required to advance the drug discovery process. This work describes the construction of an array of Escherichia coli strains for use in whole-cell screens to identify new antimicrobial compounds. We used the recombination systems from bacteriophages lambda and P1 to engineer each strain in the array for low-level expression of a single, essential gene product, thus making each strain hypersusceptible to specific inhibitors of that gene target.

Determination of the pathway for rhamnose biosynthesis in mycobacteria: cloning, sequencing and expression of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis gene encoding alpha-D-glucose-1-phosphate thymidylyltransferase.

The mycobacterial cell wall core consists of an outer lipid layer of mycolic acids connected, via arabinogalactan polysaccharide, to an inner peptidoglycan layer. An alpha-L-rhamnopyranosyl residue has been shown to be a key component linking the mycolated arabinogalactan to the peptidoglycan and, therefore, the biosynthesis of L-rhamnose (Rha) in mycobacteria was investigated as the first step of developing inhibitors of its biosynthesis. Biochemical assays were used to show that dTDP-Rha was synthesized in Mycobacterium smegmatis from alpha-D-glucose 1-phosphate (alpha-D-Glc-1-P) and dTTP by the same four enzymic steps used by Escherichia coli and other bacteria.