BACKGROUND The 'hygiene hypothesis' suggests that early exposure to microbes can be protective against atopic disease. The intestinal microbial flora could operate as an important postnatal regulator of the Th1/Th2 balance. The aim of the study was to investigate the association between early intestinal colonisation and the development of asthma in the first 3 years of life. METHODS In a pros...

[email protected] Gut microbiota play an important roles in induction of various cellular responses, including cytokine production. In this work, we examined the involvement of four intestinal strains in induction of the cytokine response (the relative expression of TNF-α, IL-6, and IL-8) in intestinal epithelial cells. Caco-2 cells were treated with cell-free supernatants (CFS) of four intestin...

Paired specimens of serum from patients from whom Bacteroides fragilis had been isolated were tested by complement fixation against a crude B. fragilis antigen. A high titre or a rise in titre to B. fragilis was obtained in each of five patients with infection after abdominal surgery but in none of 11 patients with postpartum pyrexia nor in nine with vaginitis.

Superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity was demonstrated in cell-free extracts of Bacteroides fragilis, Bacteroides vulgatus, Bacteroides distasonis, Bacteroides ovatus, and Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron. The strains were grown under anaerobic conditions in Trypticase soy broth, and the specific activity of SOD in the extracts was, in most strains, higher than in cell-free extracts of Escherichia co...

Bacteroides fragilis HSP40 phages have been detected in waters with various levels of fecal contamination of human origin. The average numbers of B. fragilis phages present in sewage water reached 5.3 x 10(3) per 100 ml of water. We found a number 1,000 times lower in a river contaminated with domestic sewage only, in which the levels of fecal coliforms and fecal streptococci were 10,000 times ...

Bacteroides fragilis is the most common anaerobe isolated from clinical infections, and in this report we demonstrate a characteristic of the species that is critical to their success as an opportunistic pathogen. Among the Bacteroides spp. in the gut, B. fragilis has the unique ability of efficiently harvesting complex N-linked glycans from the glycoproteins common to serum and serous fluid. T...

In vitro surveys of antimicrobial resistance among clinically important anaerobes are an important source of information that can be used for clinical decisions in the choice of empiric antimicrobial therapy. This study surveyed the susceptibilities of 556 clinical anaerobic isolates from four large medical centers using a broth microdilution method. Piperacillin-tazobactam was the only antimic...

The ability of the encapsulated species Bacteroides fragilis to adhere to rat peritoneal mesothelium was compared to the adherence of unecapsulated strains of Bacteroides (B. distasonis, B. vulgatus, B. thetaiotaomicron, B. ovatus, and B. "other"). Adherence was assayed by attaching plexiglas plates containing 8-mm holes to the peritoneal mesothelium of anesthetized rats. Cell suspension (0.25 ...

Two groups of unknown bacteria, which phenotypically resemble members of the Bacteroides fragilis group but phylogenetically display >5% 16S rRNA gene sequence divergence from their nearest validly described species, Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron, were characterized by phenotypic and molecular taxonomic methods. Phylogenetically and phenotypically, the unidentified bacteria displayed a relativel...