UNLABELLED β-Lactam antibiotics are the drugs of choice to treat pneumococcal infections. The spread of β-lactam-resistant pneumococci is a major concern in choosing an effective therapy for patients. Systematically tracking β-lactam resistance could benefit disease surveillance. Here we developed a classification system in which a pneumococcal isolate is assigned to a "PBP type" based on seque...

Pheromone Binding Proteins (PBPs) are one branch of a multigene family of lepidopteran Odorant Binding Proteins (OBPs) that are known for their relatively high levels of expression in male antennae. However, PBP expression has been observed at low levels in female antennae of the Saturniidae, Bombycidae and Lymantriidae, and at relatively high levels in members of the Noctuiidae. The function o...

Penicillin-binding proteins (PBPs) are membrane-associated enzymes, which are involved in the last two steps of peptidoglycan biosynthesis, and some of them are key players in cell division. Furthermore, they are targets of β-lactams, the most widely used antibiotics. Nevertheless, very little is known about the expression and regulation of PBP genes. Using transcriptional mapping, we now deter...

We used fluorescein-tagged beta-lactam antibiotics to visualize penicillin-binding proteins (PBPs) in sporulating cultures of Streptomyces griseus. Six PBPs were identified in membranes prepared from growing and sporulating cultures. The binding activity of an 85-kDa PBP increased fourfold by 10 to 12 h of sporulation, at which time the sporulation septa were formed. Cefoxitin inhibited the int...

The Leptospira interrogans ponA and pbpB genes were isolated and characterized. ponA and pbpB encode the penicillin-binding proteins (PBPs) 1 and 3, respectively. There is little sequence variation between the PBP genes from two L. interrogans strains (serovar icterohaemorrhagiae strain Verdun and serovar pomona strain RZ11). The deduced L. interrogans PBP 1 and PBP 3 protein sequences from the...

The technique of site-directed mutagenesis (SDM) is widely used in the field of molecular biology to introduce mutations into DNA (5). The development of polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based SDM has eliminated the need to clone DNA, therefore simplifying the technique and enabling the desired results to be achieved more quickly (3). The “megaprimer” method of PCR-based SDM incorporates three p...

Pulsed electric field (PEF) is commonly understood as a fast, non-thermal, and highly effective method for extraction of intracellular compounds. This treatment involves discharge of high voltage electric pulses of a few microseconds into the food product which is placed or passed between two electrodes (Angersbach et al., 2000). Results of experimental investigation of the electric breakage of...

Phosphatase and tensin homolog (PTEN) is a tumor suppressor gene located at human chromosome 10q23, might play an important role in cell proliferation, cell cycle and apoptosis of cancer cells. In this study, the eukaryotic expression vectors pBP-wt-PTEN (containing a wild-type PTEN gene) and pBP-G129R-PTEN (containing a mutant PTEN gene) were used to transfect breast cancer ZR-75-1 cells. Afte...

The relative binding affinities of the extended-spectrum cephalosporins cefepime, cefpirome, and cefaclidine for the penicillin-binding proteins (PBPs) of Escherichia coli K-12 and Pseudomonas aeruginosa SC8329 were determined. Affinities were calculated from competition experiments between these antibiotics and [3H]benzylpenicillin in isolated membrane preparations. The concentrations which re...

While several powerful domain-independent planners have recently been developed, no one of these clearly outperforms all the others in every known benchmark domain. We present PbP, a multi-planner which automatically configures a portfolio of planners by (i) computing some sets of macro-actions for every planner in the portfolio, (ii) selecting a promising combination of planners in the portfol...