Enterococcus faecalis is a common inhabitant of the gastrointestinal tracts of different animals and is also found in other environments, such as plants, soil, food and water. The diverse nature of E. faecalis, which includes pathogenic, commensal and probiotic strains, calls for the development of tools for accurate discrimination and characterization at the strain level. Here we studied the g...

Decandrinin (1), an unprecedented C9-spiro-fused 7,8-seco-ent-abietane, was obtained from the bark of an Indian mangrove, Ceriops decandra, collected in the estuary of Godavari, Andhra Pradesh. The constitution and the relative configuration of 1 were determined by HRMS (ESI) and extensive NMR investigations, and the absolute configuration by circular dichroism (CD) and optical-rotatory dispers...

OBJECTIVES Despite longstanding concern, provision of undergraduate ENT teaching has not improved in response to the aims of the UK General Medical Council's initiative Tomorrow's Doctors. Previous studies have demonstrated poor representation of ENT within the undergraduate curriculum. We aimed to identify current practice in order to establish undergraduate ENT experience across UK medical sc...

Enterococcus faecalis is an opportunistic pathogen and a leading cause of nosocomial infections. Conjugative pheromone-responsive plasmids are narrow-host-range mobile genetic elements (MGEs) that are rapid disseminators of antibiotic resistance in the faecalis species. Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR)-Cas and restriction-modification confer acquired and innate ...

Seven pimarane type-diterpenes re-isolated from Viguiera arenaria Baker and two semi-synthetic pimarane derivatives were evaluated in vitro against the following main microorganisms responsible for dental caries: Streptococcus salivarius, S. sobrinus, S. mutans, S. mitis, S. sanguinis and Lactobacillus casei. The compounds ent-pimara-8(14),15-dien-19-oic acid (PA); ent-8(14),15-pimaradien-3beta...

The use of microorganisms to induce chemical modifications in organic molecules is a very useful tool in organic synthesis, to obtain biologically active substances. The fungus Cephalosporium aphidicola is known by its ability to hydroxylate several skeleton positions of many classes of organic compounds. In this work, the microbial transformation of ent-kaur-16-en-19-ol (1) by C. aphidicola, a...

A unified approach to ent-atisane diterpenes and related atisine and hetidine alkaloids has been developed from ent-kaurane (-)-steviol (1). The conversion of the ent-kaurane skeleton to the ent-atisane skeleton features a Mukaiyama peroxygenation with concomitant cleavage of the C13-C16 bond. Conversion to the atisine skeleton (9) features a C20-selective C-H activation using a Suárez modifica...

Gibberellins (GAs) are diterpenoid phytohormones that regulate various aspects of plant growth. Tetracyclic hydrocarbon ent-kaurene is a biosynthetic intermediate of GAs, and is converted from geranylgeranyl diphosphate, a common precursor of diterpenoids, via ent-copalyl diphosphate (ent-CDP) through successive cyclization reactions catalysed by two distinct diterpene synthases, ent-CDP syntha...