The reductive products of several nitroaromatic compounds have been found to be toxic, mutagenic, and carcinogenic. The nitroreductases present in intestinal microflora have been implicated in the biotransformation of these compounds to their deleterious metabolites. A "classical" nitroreductase has been purified from Enterobacter cloacae 587-fold using a protocol which yields approximately 1 m...

Concern over the presence of veterinary drug residues in food has been increasing world wide. Because of this concern the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM) has been involved on an international basis in efforts to develop food safety standards for veterinary drugs. The major thrust of the Codex Committee on Residues of Veterinary Drugs in Foods (CC/RVDF) has be...

A microemulsion electrokinetic chromatography (MEEKC) method has been developed for the determination of four nitrofuran antibiotics (furazolidone (FZD), furaltadone (FTD), nitrofurazone (NFZ) and nitrofurantoin (NFT)) in turbot fish. The effect of buffer the pH, the concentration of SDS and the concentrations of octane and butan-1-ol were studied systematically. With the optimized experimental...

Nitroheterocyclic and nitroaromatic compounds constitute an enormous range of chemicals whose potent biological activity has significant human health and environmental implications. The biological activity of nitro-substituted compounds is derived from reductive metabolism of the nitro moiety, a process catalyzed by a variety of nitroreductase activities. Resistance of bacteria to nitro-substit...

A heterologous competitive indirect enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ciELISA) for the determination of the furaltadone metabolite 3-amino-5-morpholinomethyl-2-oxazolidinone (AMOZ) was developed. AMOZ was derivatised with 2-(4-formylphenoxy) acetic acid or 2-(3-formylphenoxy) acetic acid to obtain two novel immunizing haptens. The ability of these haptens in producing specific polyclonal antib...

We described previously a simple test on petri plates for detecting chemical carcinogens as mutagens, using an especially sensitive set of bacterial strains to detect mutagenic acitivty and a mammalian liver extract for carcinogen activity. We now extend the utility of the method by introducing two new bacterial strains which can detect with great sensitivity many carcinogens which we did not d...

Human African trypanosomiasis (HAT), caused by the protozoan parasite Trypanosoma brucei spp., is a major health problem in sub-Saharan Africa. New drugs are urgently required for the disease. Selective uptake of toxic compounds into trypanosomes has been achieved by exploiting plasma membrane transporters. For example, the P2 aminopurine transporter, along with other transporters, selectively ...

The characteristics of glutathione reductase have been investigated with preparations from a number of plant and animal sources. A specific requirement for flavin adenine dinucleotide has been demonstrated for this enzyme in pea seed and Escherichiu coli preparations (1, 2), and spectral evidence for an undissociable, unidentified flavin has been presented for the yeast enzyme (3). Although cry...