It is suggested that the story of The Magic Flute owes much to alchemy and related early mineralogy; the operaÕs architectonic structure, including its musical structure, owes much to numerology. The plot is in large part an allegorical account or description of the alchemical process and the production of the PhilosophersÕ Stone from the prima materia stibnite (spiessglanz) (antimony trisulphi...

Diagnostic material from patients with leishmaniasis is generally available as promastigotes, and proper testing for susceptibility to first-line drugs by the intracellular amastigote assay is frequently hampered by the poor infectivity of the promastigotes for the macrophage host cell. Several conditions for optimization of the in vitro metacyclogenesis and cell infectivity of Leishmania donov...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to evaluate and characterize the antileishmanial efficacy of fucoidan, a polyanionic sulphated polysaccharide from brown algae, in experimental infections of BALB/c mice with antimony-susceptible (AG83) and -resistant (GE18ER) Leishmania donovani. METHODS The effect of fucoidan was assessed against intracellular parasites in cultured macrophages and in sup...

The penicillinase plasmids, a series of extrachromosomal resistance factors in Staphylococcus aureus, were found to carry determinants of resistance to a series of inorganic ions as well as resistance to penicillin and, in some cases, erythromycin. Most of the ions involved were inhibitory but not lethal to the bacteria; the resistance markers conferred an increase in resistance by comparison w...

Introduction Bacteria may carry determinants of resistance to a number of heavy metals, including silver, bismuth, cadmium, cobalt, copper, mercury, lead, nickel, thallium or zinc cations and the oxyanions of arsenic, chromium, antimony, tellurium or tungsten. Such resistance determinants have been reviewed extensively [ 1-41. Bacterial resistance to heavy metals is conferred by specific resist...

It has been shown previously that antimony evaporated onto a Au(111) surface grows in a layer-bylayer mode. The present work compares the initial, fast-oxidation stage of these films with that on bulk polycrystalline antimony. Measurements were carried out in an ultrahigh-vacuum environment using Auger electron spectroscopy, low-energy electron diffraction, electron-energy-loss spectroscopy, an...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to observe the concentrations of trace metals boron, lithium, rubidium, antimony, tin and strontium in the serum of athletes from different modalities and sedentary subjects and the possible influence that different energy sports training modalities can have on their concentration. METHODS Eighty professional athletes and 31 sedentary males participated in...

Pentavalent antimony (SbV) compounds are still considered the first line of treatment for all forms of leishmaniasis. There have been reports of drug resistance and unresponsiveness to treatment with these drugs. We investigated the clinical response to treatment of cutaneous leishmaniasis with glucantime, the drug of choice for all forms of leishmaniasis in Iran. All individuals suspected of c...

Gene transfer systems for phytopathogenic corynebacteria have not been reported previously. In this paper we describe a conjugative 46-megadalton plasmid (pDG101) found in Corynebacterium flaccumfaciens subsp. oortii CO101 that mediates resistance to arsenite, arsenate, and antimony(III). Transfer of the plasmid from CO101 to four other strains from the C. flaccumfaciens group occurred between ...

Reactions of trimethylphosphine or diphosphines with SbCl(3) in the presence of AlCl(3) or Me(3)SiSO(3)CF(3) give ligand stabilized stibenium and stibinidenium cations. The geometry at each antimony center reveals a variety of environments for antimony that describes new bonding and highlights new directions in the chemistry of the pnictogen elements.