2 Staphylococcus aureus is one of the most common causes of hospital-and community-acquired infections and treatment of staphylococcal infections is complicated by the ability of this bacterial species to become resistant to antibiotics. Vancomycin is the drug of choice for therapy of infections due to methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) but increase in vancomycin use has led to the emergenc...

The sequence and gene organization of the van operons in vancomycin (MIC of >256 microg/ml)- and teicoplanin (MIC of > or =32 microg/ml)-resistant Paenibacillus thiaminolyticus PT-2B1 and Paenibacillus apiarius PA-B2B isolated from soil were determined. Both operons had regulatory (vanR and vanS), resistance (vanH, vanA, and vanX), and accessory (vanY, vanZ, and vanW) genes homologous to the co...

We report on a detailed study on the molecular diversity and evolutionary relationships of Tn1546-like elements in vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) from humans and animals. Restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis of the VanA transposon of 97 VRE revealed seven different Tn1546 types. Subsequent sequencing of the complete VanA transposons of 13 VRE isolates representing th...

Intertidal sediment grain size is one of the environmental parameters that can explain the interaction between the marine and terrestrial environments. Geostatistics has been widely used to model spatial distribution of many geological objects. However, there have been a few researches concerning application to grain size distribution. The aim of this study is to clarify surface sediment distri...

Cases of bacteremia caused by vancomycin-resistant E. faecium (VRE-fm) increased significantly in Taiwan. The present multicenter surveillance study was performed to reveal the associated epidemiological characteristics. In 2012, 134 non-repetitive VRE-fm isolates were prospectively collected from 12 hospitals in Taiwan. Antimicrobial susceptibility, pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), mul...

Kariyama and colleagues (5) recently described a multiplex PCR method for the detection of the vanA, vanB, vanC1, and vanC2/C3 genes, in addition to primers for the detection of the ddl genes of Enterococcus faecalis and E. faecium and of 16S rRNA (PCR control). However, the vanB primers used by these authors were derived from the sequence of the vanB1 subtype (1) and are incapable of detecting...

Sir, Vancomycin-resistant enterococci constitute an increasing clinical problem in the USA, and clonal dissemination of vancomycin-resistant isolates among hospitals, especially Enterococcus faecium, has been described. In Europe, detection of vanA enterococci in the clinical setting is less frequently reported and few reports exist of clonal dissemination of resistant isolates among different ...

Hospital-acquired infections caused by vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) are increasing. The resistance of VRE to multiple antibiotics makes them clinically challenging. There are at least six phenotypes of VRE, including VanA, VanB, VanC, VanD, VanE, and VanG (2, 8). These phenotypes correspond with the genotypes vanA, vanB, vanC, vanD, vanE, and vanG. VanA and VanB phenotypes are common ...