Rapid antibiotic susceptibility testing from blood culture bottles with species agnostic real-time polymerase chain reaction.

Development and implementation of rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing is critical for guiding patient care and improving clinical outcomes, especially in cases of sepsis. One approach to reduce the time-to-answer for antimicrobial susceptibility is monitoring the inhibition of DNA production, as differences in DNA concentrations are more quickly impacted compared to optical density changes in traditional antimicrobial susceptibility testing. Here, we use real-time PCR to rapidly determine antimicrobial susceptibility after short incubations with antibiotic.

Semi-quantitative MALDI-TOF for antimicrobial susceptibility testing in Staphylococcus aureus.

Antibiotic resistant bacterial infections are a significant problem in the healthcare setting, in many cases requiring the rapid administration of appropriate and effective antibiotic therapy. Diagnostic assays capable of quickly and accurately determining the pathogen resistance profile are therefore crucial to initiate or modify care. Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight (MALDI-TOF) mass spectrometry (MS) is a standard method for species identification in many clinical microbiology laboratories and is well positioned to be applied towards antimicrobial susceptibility testing.

A new genome-mining tool redefines the lasso peptide biosynthetic landscape.

Ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptide (RiPP) natural products are attractive for genome-driven discovery and re-engineering, but limitations in bioinformatic methods and exponentially increasing genomic data make large-scale mining of RiPP data difficult. We report RODEO (Rapid ORF Description and Evaluation Online), which combines hidden-Markov-model-based analysis, heuristic scoring, and machine learning to identify biosynthetic gene clusters and predict RiPP precursor peptides. We initially focused on lasso peptides, which display intriguing physicochemical properties and bioactivities, but their hypervariability renders them challenging prospects for automated mining.

Targeting Reactive Carbonyls for Identifying Natural Products and Their Biosynthetic Origins.

Natural products (NPs) serve important roles as drug candidates and as tools for chemical biology. However, traditional NP discovery, largely based on bioassay-guided approaches, is biased toward abundant compounds and rediscovery rates are high. Orthogonal methods to facilitate discovery of new NPs are thus needed, and herein we describe an isotope tag-based expansion of reactivity-based NP screening to address these shortcomings.

Targeted Treatment for Bacterial Infections: Prospects for Pathogen-Specific Antibiotics Coupled with Rapid Diagnostics.

Antibiotics are a cornerstone of modern medicine and have significantly reduced the burden of infectious diseases. However, commonly used broad-spectrum antibiotics can cause major collateral damage to the human microbiome, causing complications ranging from antibiotic-associated colitis to the rapid spread of resistance. Employing narrower spectrum antibiotics targeting specific pathogens may alleviate this predicament as well as provide additional tools to expand an antibiotic repertoire threatened by the inevitability of resistance.

Plantazolicin is an ultra-narrow spectrum antibiotic that targets the membrane.

Plantazolicin (PZN) is a ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified natural product from FZB42 and . Extensive tailoring to twelve of the fourteen amino acid residues in the mature natural product endows PZN with not only a rigid, polyheterocyclic structure, but also antibacterial activity. Here we report a remarkably discriminatory activity of PZN toward , which rivals a previously-described gamma (γ) phage lysis assay in distinguishing from other members of the group.

Crystal structure and absolute configuration of (3S,4aS,8aS)-N-tert-butyl-2-[(S)-3-(2-chloro-4-nitro-benzamido)-2-hy-droxy-prop-yl]deca-hydro-isoquinoline-3-carboxamide and (3S,4aS,8aS)-N-tert-butyl-2-{(S)-2-[(S)-1-(2-chloro-4-nitro-benzoyl)pyrrolidin-2-yl]-2-hy-droxy-eth-yl}deca-hydro-iso-quinoline-3-carboxamide.

The crystal structure and absolute configuration of the two new title nelfinavir analogs, C24H35ClN4O5, (I), and C27H39ClN4O5, (II), have been determined. Each of these mol-ecules exhibits a number of disordered moieties. There are intra-molecular N-H⋯O hydrogen bonds in both (I) and (II).

Identification of the minimal cytolytic unit for streptolysin S and an expansion of the toxin family.

Background: Streptolysin S (SLS) is a cytolytic virulence factor produced by the human pathogen Streptococcus pyogenes and other Streptococcus species. Related "SLS-like" toxins have been characterized in select strains of Clostridium and Listeria, with homologous clusters bioinformatically identified in a variety of other species. SLS is a member of the thiazole/oxazole-modified microcin (TOMM) family of natural products.

HIV protease inhibitors block streptolysin S production.

Streptolysin S (SLS) is a post-translationally modified peptide cytolysin that is produced by the human pathogen Streptococcus pyogenes. SLS belongs to a large family of azole-containing natural products that are biosynthesized via an evolutionarily conserved pathway. SLS is an important virulence factor during S.

Fluorescent nucleoside analogue displays enhanced emission upon pairing with guanine.

A fluorescent nucleobase analogue, 7-aminoquinazoline-2,4-(1H,3H)-dione, is incorporated into a DNA oligonucleotide and senses mismatched pairing by displaying G-specific fluorescence enhancement.

Fluorescent ribonucleoside as a FRET acceptor for tryptophan in native proteins.

A new fluorescent ribonucleoside analogue, containing 5-aminoquinazoline-2,4(1H,3H)-dione, acts as a Forster resonance energy transfer acceptor for tryptophan (R(0) = 22 A) and displays visible emission (440 nm). As tryptophan is frequently found at or near the recognition domains of RNA binding proteins, this FRET pair facilitates the study of RNA binding to native proteins and peptides, which is demonstrated here for the HIV-1 Rev association with the Rev Response Element (RRE).