Staphylococcus aureus exhibits a strong capacity to attach to abiotic or biotic surfaces and form biofilms, which lead to chronic infections. We have recently shown that Esp, a serine protease secreted by commensal Staphylococcus epidermidis, disassembles preformed biofilms of S. aureus and inhibits its colonization. Esp was expected to degrade protein determinants of the adhesive and cohesive ...

The enterococcal surface protein, Esp, originally found in Enterococcus faecalis, has been associated with increased virulence, colonization, and biofilm formation (2, 3, 5, 6). Recently, a variant esp gene was found in Enterococcus faecium isolates from humans (L. Baldassarri, L. Burtuccini, M. G. Ammendolia, G. Gherardi, and R. Creti, Letter, Lancet 357:1802, 2001; R. J. Willems, W. Homan, J....

The performances of two continuously monitoring mycobacterial culture systems-ESP Culture System II (ESP II; Trek Diagnostics, Inc. , Westlake, Ohio) and BACTEC MGIT 960 (BD Biosciences, Sparks, Md. )-were compared. In addition to both liquid media, all specimens were plated onto Middlebrook 7H11/7H11 selective agar. A total of 3, 151 specimens of all types (56.3% were respiratory specimens) we...

ESP is a language for programmable devices. Unlike C which forces a tradeoff that requires giving up ease of programming and reliability to achieve high performance, ESP is designed to provide all of these three properties simultaneously. This paper measures the performance impact on applications of using ESP to implement VMMC firmware. It compares the performance of an earlier implementation o...