Pseudomonas aeruginosa tagged posts

1. Highlights • Quinolone antibiotics fail to kill bacterial populations at high density • Exhaustion of OXPHOS substrates drives bacterial persistence • Carbon and electron acceptor supplementation restores antibiotic activity • Metabolic priming of OXPHOS reverses tolerance in diverse bacterial species.  2.Sensitization to Cipro in Clinically Relevant Pathogens. 

MIT researchers have discovered a way to make bacteria more vulnerable to quinolones, which include ciprofloxacin and are often used to treat infections such as E coli and Staphylococcus aureus. The new strategy overcomes a key limitation of these drugs, which is that they often fail against infections that feature a very high density of bacteria...

Crystal structure of the PodA protein complex with three molecules of 1-hydroxyphenazine, the reaction product, bound in the active sites. Credit: Kyle Costa/Caltech

Many infectious pathogens are difficult to treat because they develop into biofilms, layers of metabolically active but slowly growing bacteria embedded in a protective layer of slime, which are inherently more resistant to antibiotics. Now, researchers at Caltech and University of Oxford have made progress in the fight against biofilms. Led by Dianne Newman, the Gordon M. Binder/Amgen Professor of Biology and Geobiology, the group identified a protein that degrades and inhibits biofilms of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, the primary pathogen in cystic fibrosis (CF) infections.

“Pseudomonas aeruginosa causes chronic infections that ar...

Pseudomonas aeruginosa killed by the engineered cationic antimicrobial peptide (eCAP). Killed bacteria (red), living bacteria (green). Credit: Jeffrey Melvin, Pitt

A potential drug therapy developed at the University of Pittsburgh Center for Vaccine Research (CVR) has proven effective against tough bacterial biofilms and a respiratory virus simultaneously. The drug outperforms traditional therapies in the laboratory setting. “To the best of our knowledge, no other antibiotics out there work on both the bacteria and the virus during a co-infection,” said Jennifer M. Bomberger, Ph.D., assistant professor in Pitt’s Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics.

Chronic infections, such as those that kill cystic fibrosis patients, resist the body’s efforts to clear them from the lungs, sin...

bacterial biofilm

University of Birmingham and NIHR Surgical Reconstruction and Microbiology Research Centre (SRMRC) investigated antibacterial activity of acetic acid against key burn wound colonising organisms growing both planktonically and as biofilms.

Burns are a common traumatic injury and prone to becoming infected due to loss of a normal skin barrier. Local infection of the burn wound and subsequent sepsis are key concerns for patients, with sepsis the leading cause of death among patients with burn wounds. Infections of burn wounds are difficult to treat with traditional antibiotics as they do not effectively reach the wound, and the infecting organisms are often highly antibiotic resistant.

Low concentrations of acetic acid can be used to treat biofilms, and thus be used as alter...