Staphylococcus aureus, a notorious human pathogen, is a major cause of the community as well as healthcare associated infections. It can cause a diversity of recalcitrant infections mainly due to the acquisition of resistance to multiple drugs, its diverse range of virulence factors, and the ability to produce biofilm in indwelling medical devices. Such biofilm associated chronic infections often lead to increase in morbidity and mortality posing a high socio-economic burden, especially in developing countries. Since biofilm formation and antibiotic resistance function dependent on each other, detection of biofilm expression in clinical isolates would be advantageous in treatment decision. In this premise, we attempt to investigate the biofilm formation and its association with antibiotic resistance in clinical isolates from the patients visiting tertiary health care hospitals in Nepal. Bacterial cells isolated from clinical samples identified as S. aureus were examined for in-vitro biofilm production using both phenotypic and genotypic assays. The S. aureus isolates were also examined for susceptibility patterns of clinically relevant antibiotics as well as inducible clindamycin resistance using standard microbiological techniques and D-test, respectively. Among 161 S. aureus isolates, 131 (81.4%) were methicillin resistant S. aureus (MRSA) and 30 (18.6%) were methicillin sensitive S. aureus (MSSA) strains. Although a majority of MRSA strains (69.6%) showed inducible clindamycin resistance, almost all isolates (97% and 94%) were sensitive toward chloramphenicol and tetracycline, respectively. Detection of in vitro production of biofilm revealed the association of biofilm with methicillin as well as inducible clindamycin resistance among the clinical S. aureus isolates.

Many studies have been now focused on the promising approach of fungal endophytes to protect the plant from nutrient deficiency and environmental stresses along with better development and productivity. Quantitative and qualitative protein characteristics are regulated at genomic, transcriptomic, and posttranscriptional levels. Here, we used integrated in-depth proteome analyses to characterize the relationship between endophyte Piriformospora indica and Brassica napus plant highlighting its potential involvement in symbiosis and overall growth and development of the plant. An LC-MS/MS based label-free quantitative technique was used to evaluate the differential proteomics under P. indica treatment vs. control plants. In this study, 8,123 proteins were assessed, of which 46 showed significant abundance (34 downregulated and 12 upregulated) under high confidence conditions (p-value ≤ 0.05, fold change ≥2, confidence level 95%). Mapping of identified differentially expressed proteins with bioinformatics tools such as GO and KEGG pathway analysis showed significant enrichment of gene sets involves in metabolic processes, symbiotic signaling, stress/defense responses, energy production, nutrient acquisition, biosynthesis of essential metabolites. These proteins are responsible for root’s architectural modification, cell remodeling, and cellular homeostasis during the symbiotic growth phase of plant’s life. We tried to enhance our knowledge that how the biological pathways modulate during symbiosis?

Staphylococcus genus comprising both Staphylococcus aureus and coagulase negative staphylococci (CoNS) are widely distributed in nature and can infect diversity of hosts. Indeed, staphylococci are the major pathogens causing biofilm associated infections caused by contaminated hospital indwelling devices. These infections are persistent in nature being highly refractory to various stresses including antibiotics. Implementation of efficient diagnostic techniques for the biofilm production would help minimize the disease burden. Thus, early detection of pathogenic strains producing biofilms warrant the utmost importance in diagnostic laboratories especially in resource limited settings. Among 375 isolates collected from different clinical specimens, 214 (57%) were identified as coagulase negative staphylococci and 161 (43%) S. aureus. Detection of In-vitro biofilm formation in these isolates were carried out by three commonly used phenotypic assays and a genotypic assay. While evaluating the results, tissue-culture method with supplemented glucose and sucrose showed the best correlation with the results of genotypic assay.