The frequent clinical observation of the association of diabetes mellitus and candidiasis'z prompted an investigation of the effect of alloxan diabetes on experimental infections in mice caused by Candida albicans, Candida tropicalis, Candida guilliermondii, and Candida parapsilosis. The results of this investigation reveal that alloxan diabetes enhances, in the mouse, experimental infections c...

The Candida Genome Database (CGD, http://www.candidagenome.org/) provides online access to genomic sequence data and manually curated functional information about genes and proteins of the human pathogen Candida albicans. Herein, we describe two recently added features, Candida Biochemical Pathways and the Textpresso full-text literature search tool. The Biochemical Pathways tool provides visua...

We assessed the in vitro activity of micafungin against preformed Candida biofilms by measuring the concentration of drug causing the most fungal damage and inhibition of regrowth. We studied 37 biofilm-producing Candida spp. strains from blood cultures. We showed that micafungin was active against planktonic and sessile forms of Candida albicans strains and moderately active against Candida pa...

Candida are true ‘opportunistic pathogens’ and only instigate oral infection when there is an underlying predisposing condition in the host. Oropharyngeal candidiasis is a common occurrence in the course of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) disease progression. The majority of infections are due to Candida albicans although other species such as Candida glabrata, Candida tropicalis, Candida kr...

Recently, it was proposed that the opportunistic yeast pathogen Candida parapsilosis was a complex composed of the following three species: Candida parapsilosis sensu stricto, Candida orthopsilosis, and Candida metapsilosis. A set of 344 clinical isolates of Candida parapsilosis from Monterrey, Mexico was re-identified by RFLP. Their antifungal susceptibility to fluconazole, caspofungin, anidul...

In view of the growing incidence and the high mortality of invasive aspergillosis and candidiasis, adequate diagnostic techniques permitting timely onset of treatment are of paramount importance. More than 90 % of all invasive fungal infections in immunocompromised individuals can be attributed to Candida and Aspergillus species. To date, standardized techniques permitting rapid, sensitive and,...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Invasive candidiasis is a major fungal infection occurring in patients who have prolonged hospital admissions. The rapid detection and confirmation of Candida spp. in clinical specimens is essential for efficient management and improved prognosis of these patients. The purpose of this study was to develop a real-time LightCycler polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assay for t...

opportunistic fungal infections including candidiasis have increased dramatically in recent years. most medically important fungi are candida species. rapid identification od candida isolates to the species level in the clinical laboratory is necessary for more rapid and effective antifungal therapy and to facilitate hospital infection control measures. conventional morphological methods for id...