Staphylococcus aureus is a devastating mammalian pathogen for which the development of new therapeutic approaches is urgently needed due to the prevalence of antibiotic resistance. During infection pathogens must overcome the dual threats of host-imposed manganese starvation, termed nutritional immunity, and the oxidative burst of immune cells. These defenses function synergistically, as host-i...

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infection is still a major global healthcare problem. Of concern is S. aureus bacteremia, which exhibits high rates of morbidity and mortality and can cause metastatic or complicated infections such as infective endocarditis or sepsis. MRSA is responsible for most global S. aureus bacteremia cases, and compared with methicillin-sensitive S. aur...

Cell wall-active antibiotics cause induction of a locus that leads to elevated synthesis of two methionine sulfoxide reductases (MsrA1 and MsrB) in Staphylococcus aureus. To understand the regulation of this locus, reporter strains were constructed by integrating a DNA fragment consisting of the msrA1/msrB promoter in front of a promoterless lacZ gene in the chromosome of wild-type and MsrA1-, ...

Major challenges in diagnostic molecular microbiology are to develop a simple assay to distinguish Staphylococcus aureus from the less virulent but clinically important coagulase-negative staphylococci (CoNS) and to simultaneously determine their antibiotic resistance profiles. Multiplex PCR assays have been developed for the detection of methicillin- and mupirocin-resistant S. aureus and CoNS ...

Ribitol-teichoic acid antibodies were measured by a new enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and by counterimmunoelectrophoresis in serum samples from 47 patients with serious Staphylococcus aureus infections, 63 infected patients, and 177 healthy controls. The same antigen was used for both tests. The group of patients with S. aureus endocarditis (6 patients) had significantly higher ELIS...

The aims of this study were to develop multiplex PCR for simultaneous detection of five superantigenic toxin genes (sea, seb, sec, sed and tst-1) in Staphylococcus aureus isolated from 149 clinical samples and nasal swabs from 201 healthy subjects in Thailand, and to compare prevalence and expression of those genes between methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) and methicillin-sensitive S. aure...

Staphylococcus aureus (SA or S. aureus) is a common pathogen that leads to local and systemic infections in communitarian and hospitalised patients. Staphylococcus colonizing nasal or pharyngeal sites can become virulent and cause severe infections. In this study, we collected 322 pharyngeal exudates and 142 nasal exudates from hospitalised and outpatients for screening purposes. The carriage r...

This study was designed to evaluate the ability of MALDI Biotyper (MBT) compared with Vitek™ 2 compact system for accurate identification of Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) and coagulase-negative staphylococci (CNS) strains and discriminate methicillin-sensitive S. aureus (MSSA) from methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA). Throughout Al-Qassim region, Saudi Arabia, a total of 198 isolates of ...

Introduction: Clindamycin is considered an useful alternate drug in penicillin-allergic patients in the treatment of skin & soft tissue infections caused by Staphylococcus aureus. Staphylococcus spp. can be resistant to erythromycin through either erm or msr A genes. Strains with erm-mediated erythromycin resistance may possess inducible clindamycin resistance but may appear susceptible to clin...

Objectives: To describe the Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) nasal carriage as well as its antibiotic resistance patterns among Tibetan healthy school children in Songpan County in Southwest China. Methods: Nasal swabs of both anterior nares were collected from healthy school children. The identification of S. aureus was based on the colony morphology, biochemical tests and the results of Slid...