The global burden of fungal infections is unacceptably high. The human fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans causes cryptococcosis and accounts for a significant proportion of this burden. Cryptococci undergo a number of elaborate interactions with their hosts, including survival and proliferation within phagocytes as well as dissemination to the central nervous system and other tissues. In this review we highlight a number of exciting recent advances in the field of cryptococcal biology. In particular we discuss new insights into cryptococcal morphology and its impact on virulence, as well as describing novel findings revealing how cryptoccoci may 'talk' to each other.
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New weapons in the Cryptococcus infection toolkit.
Curr Opin Microbiol
December 2016
Institute of Microbiology and Infection and School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK. Electronic address:
The global burden of fungal infections is unacceptably high. The human fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans causes cryptococcosis and accounts for a significant proportion of this burden. Cryptococci undergo a number of elaborate interactions with their hosts, including survival and proliferation within phagocytes as well as dissemination to the central nervous system and other tissues.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSiderophores; iron scavengers: the novel & promising targets for pathogen specific antifungal therapy.
Expert Opin Ther Targets
December 2016
a Centre for Biotechnology , Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak , Haryana , India.
The recent emergence of resistance, toxicity paradigm and limited efficacy of conventional antifungal drugs necessitate the identification of de novo targets in fungal metabolism. One of the most critical physiological processes during in vivo pathogenesis is maintenance of iron homeostasis. The most life threatening opportunistic human fungal pathogens like Aspergillus, Candida and Cryptococcus exploit the siderophore mediated iron uptake mechanism either for survival, virulence, propagation or resistance to oxidative stress envisaged in vivo during infection.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPosaconazole: a new antifungal weapon.
Rev Recent Clin Trials
September 2011
Department of Nephrology, General Hospital of Rhodes, Greece.
The last twenty years, the incidence of invasive fungal infections (IFI) has risen dramatically due to the prolongation of survival of patients with multiple risk factors for fungal infections. Amphotericin B was for more than 40 years the gold standard for almost all IFI, but toxicity and resistance, especially of new and emerging pathogens remained important issues. Fluconazole and itraconazole have also the same disadvantage of resistance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHigh-throughput discovery of broad-spectrum peptide antibiotics.
FASEB J
September 2010
Department of Biochemistry, Tulane University Health Sciences Center, New Orleans, LA 70112, USA.
Membrane-permeabilizing peptide antibiotics are an underutilized weapon in the battle against drug-resistant microorganisms. This is true, in part, because of the bottleneck caused by the lack of explicit design principles and the paucity of simple high-throughput methods for selection. In this work, we characterize the requirements for broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity by membrane permeabilization and find that different microbial membranes have very different susceptibilities to permeabilization by individual antimicrobial peptides.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF[Purification and antimicrobial activity of human neutrophil defensins].
Zhonghua Yi Xue Za Zhi
November 1991
Neutrophils are one of the weapons of host defenses against microbial infection. Their ability to kill the invading microorganisms depends on two principle mechanisms. One depends on production of reactive oxygen intermediates (ROI) by stimulated neutrophils, and the other depends on the delivery of antimicrobial contents of the neutrophils' cytoplasmic granules, oxygen-independent.
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