Hepcidin as a Sensitive and Treatment-Responsive Acute-Phase Marker in Patients with Bacteremia: A Pilot Study.

Hepcidin regulates iron metabolism by inhibiting intestinal iron absorption and iron release from iron stores. In addition to iron overload, inflammatory conditions also up-regulate hepcidin synthesis, which may serve as an antimicrobial defense by reducing iron availability to the invading microbes. The purpose of this study is to test this hypothesis in human patients by determining serum hepcidin concentration by enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) in healthy blood donors ( = 60) and patients hospitalized because of bacteremia ( = 50), before (day 0) and after seven days (day 7) of appropriate antibiotic treatment.

as a Dynamic Vehicle for the Dissemination of Antimicrobial-Resistance Determinants: Review and In Silico Analysis.

The present paper is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on the role of in the accumulation of genes associated with antimicrobial resistance and then the transmission of them to other pathogenic bacteria occupying the same human intestinal niche. The second part describes an in silico analysis of the genomes of available in GenBank, with regard to the presence of mobile genetic elements and antimicrobial resistance genes.