Broad spectrum antimicrobial activities from spore-forming bacteria isolated from the Vietnam Sea.

The widespread occurrence of pathogenic bacteria resistant to last-line antibiotics has resulted in significant challenges in human and veterinary medicine. There is an urgent need for new antimicrobial agents that can be used to control these life threating pathogens. We report the identification of antimicrobial activities, against a broad range of bacterial pathogens, from a collection of marine-derived spore-forming bacteria.

Simvastatin Efficiently Reduces Levels of Alzheimer's Amyloid Beta in Yeast.

A large-scale epidemiology study on statins previously showed that simvastatin was unique among statins in reducing the incidence of dementia. Since amyloid beta (Aβ42) is the protein that is most associated with Alzheimer's disease, this study has focused on how simvastatin influences the turnover of native Aβ42 and Aβ42 fused with green fluorescent protein (GFP), in the simplest eukaryotic model organism, . Previous studies have established that yeast constitutively producing Aβ42 fused to GFP offer a convenient means of analyzing yeast cellular responses to Aβ42.