This study aimed to determine the antifungal activity of leaf aqueous and hydroethanolic extracts of 10 plants from the Brazilian Cerrado on Colletotrichum gloeosporioides and Corynespora cassiicola. Antifungal activity was measured through the incorporation of each extract in a culture media or spore suspension, at 50% concentration relative to the volume, determining respectively the mycelial...

Xanthoria parietina mycobiont was isolated and cultured under axenic conditions. The development of the fungi in aposymbiotic culture depended on the carbon source present in the nutritive medium. The highest development was obtained with 4% glucose in LBM. Nevertheless, the major yield of spore germination was in BBM medium. When the sporulation process was carried out in LBM (without contamin...

Bacterial endospores can remain dormant for decades yet can respond to nutrients, germinate, and resume growth within minutes. An essential step in the germination process is degradation of the spore cortex peptidoglycan wall, and the SleB protein in Bacillus species plays a key role in this process. Stable incorporation of SleB into the spore requires the YpeB protein, and some evidence sugges...

The germination of spore-forming bacteria in high-salinity environments is of applied interest for food microbiology and soil ecology. It has previously been shown that high salt concentrations detrimentally affect Bacillus subtilis spore germination, rendering this process slower and less efficient. The mechanistic details of these salt effects, however, remained obscure. Since initiation of n...

Chemokines have been found to exert direct, defensin-like antimicrobial activity in vitro, suggesting that, in addition to orchestrating cellular accumulation and activation, chemokines may contribute directly to the innate host response against infection. No observations have been made, however, demonstrating direct chemokine-mediated promotion of host defense in vivo. Here, we show that the m...

Microscopic fungi are able to contaminate and deteriorate various food products and can subsequently cause health problems. Long usage of the same preservatives and disinfectants against spoilage fungi may lead to the development of fungal resistance to those chemicals. The objective of this study was to investigate the susceptibility of 3 Penicillium genus fungi, isolated from foodstuffs, to o...

AIMS To better understand the parameters that govern spore dissemination after lung exposure using in vitro cell systems. METHODS AND RESULTS We evaluated the kinetics of uptake, germination and proliferation of Bacillus anthracis Sterne spores in association with human primary lung epithelial cells, Calu-3 and A549 cell lines. We also analysed the influence of various cell culture medium for...

Bacteria of Bacillus species sporulate upon starvation, and the resultant dormant spores germinate when the environment appears likely to allow the resumption of vegetative growth. Normally, the rates of germination of individual spores in populations are very heterogeneous, and the current work has investigated whether spore-to-spore communication enhances the synchronicity of germination. In ...

By far the majority of studies hitherto made on germination of bacterial spores have employed the appearance of visible turbidity as the criterion of germination. Obviously this technique can reveal no quantitative characteristics of the germination process and is therefore of value only in establishing that some germination does or does not take place. Even here its value may be questioned, si...

Signalling mechanisms involving cAMP have a well-documented role in the coordination of multicellular development and differentiation leading to spore formation in the social amoeba, Dictyostelium discoideum. The involvement of cAMP in the poorly understood developmental stages of spore dormancy and germination have been investigated in this study. Dormant spores contained up to 11-fold more cA...