BACKGROUND Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a complex disease caused by genetic and environmental interactions. AD impairs skin barrier function, enabling microorganisms to penetrate and interact with the immune system. OBJECTIVES This study aimed to investigate the presence of specific immunoglobulin (Ig) E antibodies to the yeast species Candida pelliculosa, Candida guilliermondii, Candida famata,...

The increasing magnitude of antifungal resistance as well as the advent of new antifungal drugs has generated a renewed interest in fungal susceptibility testing. We used a previously described disk diffusion method to evaluate the susceptibility profile of a large collection of recent clinical Candida spp. isolates against fluconazole. A total of 1,784 yeast isolates were tested, including the...

This report describes the application of reference strand-mediated conformational analysis (RSCA), a novel DNA typing technique, for the identification of clinically significant fungal pathogens. RSCA is a heteroduplex-based conformational method which relies on detecting differences in the DNA conformation of heteroduplexes generated in this study by the annealing of different fungal 18S rRNA ...

Phenol and phenolic compounds are environmental pollutants present in industrial wastewaters such as coal tar, oil refineries and petrochemical plants. Phenol removal from industrial effluents is extremely important for the protection of environment. Usually, phenol degradation is carried out by physicochemical methods that are costly and produce hazardous metabolites. Recently, phenol biodegra...

Background and Purpose: By using advanced detection/identification methods, the list of emerging uncommon opportunistic yeast infections is rapidly expanding worldwide. Our aim in the present study was sequence-based species delineation of previously unidentified yeasts obtained from a clinically yeast collection. Materials and Methods: A total of twenty three out of the 855 (5.7%) yeast isolat...

A high throughput screening (HTS) methodology for evaluation of cellular lipid content based on Nile red fluorescence reads using black background 96-wells test plates and a plate reader equipment allowed the rapid intracellular lipid estimation of strains from a Brazilian phylloplane yeast collection. A new oleaginous yeast, Meyerozyma guilliermondii BI281A, was selected, for which the gravime...

Neutrophils from diabetic patients controlled with insulin showed impaired phagocytosis of a yeast, Candida guilliermondii. The defect was detected by measuring the initial rate of phagocytosis at optimal concentrations of phagocytes and organisms in autologous plasma. By mixing normal neutrophils in diabetic plasma and vice versa both cellular and plasma abnormalities were shown. The defect wa...