OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to investigate the antifungal effect of bee venom (BV) and sweet bee venom (SBV) against Candida albicans (C. albicans) clinical isolates. METHODS In this study, BV and SBV were examined for antifungal activities against the Korean Collection for Type Cultures (KCTC) strain and 10 clinical isolates of C. albicans. The disk diffusion method was used to ...

The in vitro inhibitory activity of trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole is inversely related to the amount of thymine and thymidine in the test medium; manufacturers must adequately control their media to avoid spurious antimicrobial susceptibility results. No differences were observed when commercial Mueller-Hinton broth and agar were compared with a semisynthetic broth medium by the use of microdil...

Effective treatment of bacterial infection relies on timely diagnosis and proper prescription of antibiotic drugs. The antimicrobial susceptibility test (AST) is one of the most crucial experimental procedures, providing the baseline information for choosing effective antibiotic agents and their dosages. Conventional methods, however, require long incubation times or significant instrumentation...

With rapid emergence of multidrug-resistant bacteria, there is often a need to perform susceptibility testing for less commonly used or newer antimicrobial agents. Such testing can often be performed only by using labor-intensive, manual dilution methods and lies outside the capacity of most clinical labs, necessitating reference laboratory testing and thereby delaying the availability of susce...

OBJECTIVES To model the standard broth microdilution method, based on a modified Gompertz function, to obtain accurate vancomycin MIC values for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). The effect of these MIC values on the vancomycin therapeutic target of AUC(0-24)/MIC ≥ 400 was evaluated. METHODS Three clinical isolates of MRSA with different vancomycin MIC values were used in th...

Aspergillus biofilms were prepared from Aspergillus fumigatus, Aspergillus flavus, and Aspergillus terreus via a 96-well plate-based method, and the combined antifungal activity of tacrolimus with azoles or amphotericin B against Aspergillus biofilms was investigated via a broth microdilution checkerboard technique system. Our results suggest that combinations of tacrolimus with voriconazole or...

The sensitivity and specificity of seven methods (agar dilution, broth microdilution, Etest at 0.5 and 2.0 McFarland (McF) inocula, two agar screening methods, and population studies [PS]) were evaluated in a double-blind study involving 284 methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) strains and 45 Staphylococcus strains with reduced susceptibilities to vancomycin (SRSV). The results we...

In attempt to find new pharmacologically active molecules, we report here the synthesis and in vitro antimicrobial activity of various 3-(1,3,4-oxadiazol-2-yl)-quinazolin-4(3H)-ones. The antimicrobial activity of title compounds were examined against two gram positive bacteria (S. aureus, S. pyogenes), two gram negative bacteria (E. coli, P. aeruginosa) and three fungi (C. albicans, A. niger, A...