Infections caused by non-tuberculous mycobacteria and multidrug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis are difficult to treat. New compounds potentially active against these bacteria are therefore constantly being sought. Among them is grepafloxacin, a new C5 fluoroquinolone. A panel of 130 isolates of mycobacteria including 33 M. tuberculosis isolates and 97 isolates of different species of atyp...

Bedaquiline (BDQ), an ATP synthase inhibitor, is the first drug to be approved for treatment of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis in decades. Though BDQ has shown excellent efficacy in clinical trials, its early bactericidal activity during the first week of chemotherapy is minimal. Here, using microfluidic devices and time-lapse microscopy of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, we confirm the absence o...

BACKGROUND The nonspecific clinical presentation and paucibacillary nature of tuberculous pleuritis remains a challenge for diagnosis. Diagnosis of tuberculous pleural effusion depends on the demonstration of the presence of tubercle bacilli in the sputum, pleural fluid, or pleural biopsy specimen, or demonstration of granuloma in pleura by histological examination. We examined the clinical uti...

Mycobacterium tuberculosis rapidly reduces nitrate, leading to the accumulation of nitrite. This characteristic served for the past 40 years to differentiate M. tuberculosis from other members of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC), such as Mycobacterium bovis (non-BCG [referred to here as simply "M. bovis"]), Mycobacterium bovis BCG, Mycobacterium africanum, or Mycobacterium microti....

Mycobacterium tuberculosis and other pathogenic mycobacteria export abundant quantities of proteins into their extracellular milieu when growing either axenically or within phagosomes of host cells. One major extracellular protein, the enzyme glutamine synthetase, is of particular interest because of its link to pathogenicity. Pathogenic mycobacteria, but not nonpathogenic mycobacteria, export ...

Mycobacteria cause a variety of illnesses that differ in severity and public health implications. The differentiation of Mycobacterium tuberculosis from nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) is of primary importance for infection control and choice of antimicrobial therapy. Despite advances in molecular diagnostics, the ability to rapidly diagnose M. tuberculosis infections by PCR is still inadequa...

The current study aimed to evaluate the feasibility of using aminoglycoside 2″-O-phosphotransferase aph(2″) gene as a positive selection marker in N. asteroides, M. smegmatis, abscessus and tuberculosis. gene, known confer resistance tobramycin, was PCR amplified from farcinica cloned into two plasmid vectors, pMSG383 pDB151, harboring hygromycin zeocin markers, respectively. recombinant plasmi...

Early identification of tuberculosis in the clinical setting is of great importance in order for specific therapy to be swiftly initiated. MB REDOX (Heipha Diagnostika), a growth-based medium without radioactive materials, was evaluated and was compared to the BACTEC system for detection of mycobacteria, including the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex and atypical mycobacteria. MB REDOX consis...

Nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) have recently been recognized as important species that cause disease even in immunocompetent individuals. The mechanisms that these species use to infect and persist inside macrophages are not well characterised. To gain insight concerning this process we used THP-1 macrophages infected with M. abscessus, M. fortuitum, M. celatum, and M. tuberculosis. Our resu...

BACKGROUND Tuberculosis and other mycobacterial infections are well recognised complications of HIV infection and surveillance is thus required. METHODS All mycobacteria isolated from HIV positive subjects and referred to the Public Health Laboratory Service South East Regional Tuberculosis Centre (SERTC) from the first such case in 1984 until the end of 1992 were reviewed. RESULTS A total ...