OBJECTIVES Commercially produced sterile green bottle fly Lucilia sericata maggots are successfully employed by practitioners worldwide to clean a multitude of chronic necrotic wounds and reduce wound bacterial burdens during maggot debridement therapy (MDT). Secretions from the maggots exhibit antimicrobial activity along with other activities beneficial for wound healing. With the rise of mul...

Defensins are the most widespread antimicrobial peptides characterised in insects. These cyclic peptides, 4-6 kDa in size, are folded into α-helical/β-sheet mixed structures and have a common conserved motif of three intramolecular disulfide bridges with a Cys1-Cys4, Cys2-Cys5 and Cys3-Cys6 connectivity. They have the ability to kill especially Gram-positive bacteria and some fungi, but Gram-ne...

introduction ophthalmomyiasis is a rare disorder that is caused by invasion of dipterous larvae to necrotic tissues. case presentation an 80-year-old woman with invasive basal cell carcinoma (bcc) presented anabnormal growth of worm in her eye. she had ophthalmomyiasis caused by lucilia sericata larva in here nucleated eye. l. sericata is common all over the temperate and tropical regions, main...

conclusions early diagnosis is required for the management of human myiasis. if we don’t properly recognize and treat ophthalmomyiasis, it can progress rapidly and can result in destruction of orbital tissues. the main treatment modality includes removal of the larvae and if necessary, surgical debridement. case presentation we describe a young male with wound and ocular myiasis due to lucilia ...

Larvae of Lucilia sericata are used for maggot debridement therapy (MDT) because of their ability to remove necrotic tissue and eradicate bacterial pathogens of infected wounds. So far, very few antibacterial factors have been fully characterized (eg lucifensin). Using a molecular approach, some other putative antimicrobial compounds, including three novel lysozymes, have been previously identi...

The larvae of the common green bottle fly (Lucilia sericata) produce antibacterial secretions that have a therapeutic effect on chronic and nonhealing wounds. Recent developments in insect biotechnology have made it possible to use these larvae as a source of novel anti-infectives. Here, we report the application of next-generation RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) to characterize the transcriptomes of ...