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It is widely known that systemic and mucosal candidiasis caused by Candida non-albicans strains endangers the lives of hospitalised patients since these pathogens are extremely difficult to defeat by commonly used antifungal agents. The present study determined the in vitro activities of a novel antimicotic drug - caspofungin - against 76 Candida non-albicans isolates by means of the CLSI reference method for broth dilution antifungal susceptibility testing of yeasts and the E-test procedure for comparison. Caspofungin was efficacious against the majority of strains tested, with the average MICs90 evaluated by the microdilution method and E-tests amounting to 1 mg/l and 0.5 mg/l, respectively. Since the agreement between MICs within +/-2 dilutions obtained by these two techniques was 92% (Kappa coefficient of 0.92), the E-test procedure seems to be a reliable alternative to the broth microdilution method and may provide another choice for clinical laboratories.

Routinely collected patient data are often recorded as unstructured and ambiguous free text by physicians. These data are, however, also of interest to clinical researchers, for whom they must be clearly defined and preferably coded. We have developed an application to support physicians in recording patient data in a structured, yet expressive manner. The flexible domain-independent data representation and storage approach underlying the application made data extraction for research purposes very complex. The changes that we made to the representation and storage approach to facilitate extraction, without reducing expressiveness for data entry, are presented in this paper, together with the underlying principles of the data extraction tool that we created to enable data extraction for clinical research.

The present studies provide new data on the involvement of menaquinol oxidases in substrate oxidation and energy conservation in aerobically grown, resting cells of Staphylococcus aureus 17810R, starved of endogenous energy reserves and supplemented with glutamate or L-lactate. These cells were energetically competent, since they oxidized both substrates, generated an electrochemical proton gradient (deltamuH+) and synthesized ATP via oxidative phosphorylation. Studies with KCN showed that: (i) L-lactate oxidation occurred via two terminal menaquinol oxidases - the ba3-type sensitive to low KCN and the bo-type insensitive to cyanide, (ii) glutamate oxidation proceeded via the bo-type oxidase, and (iii) ATP synthesis with glutamate or L-lactate was coupled only to the bo-type oxidase. Also in glucose-grown cells oxidizing L-lactate, ATP synthesis was coupled to the highly repressed bo-type oxidase. It is suggested that in the respiratory chain of strain 17810R two energy coupling sites may be present: in the complex of NADH-menaquinone oxidoreductase and in the complex of the bo-type menaquinol oxidase. The rate of ATP synthesis was similar with both substrates, but the rate of their oxidation differed significantly: the P/O ratios were 1.5 and 0.03 with glutamate and L-lactate, respectively. CCCP accelerated glutamate oxidation by 50% but was without effect on L-lactate oxidation. In cell lysates, the rates of NADH and L-lactate oxidation were equal. It is concluded that in whole cells of S. aureus 17810R oxidation of NADH derived from glutamate breakdown is tightly coupled to phosphorylation, while L-lactate oxidation seems to be rather loosely coupled.