For the Therapy of Onychomycoses.
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Cryptococcus neoformans, an opportunistic fungus, may cause cutaneous disease by dissemination from primary lung infection or, more rarely, by direct cutaneous inoculation. Cellulitis in an immunocompromised host who does not respond to conventional antibacterial therapy should alert the physician to consider other diagnoses, including cryptococcal skin infection.
Botrytis cinerea is a plant-pathogenic fungus that produces the disease known as grey mould in a wide variety of agriculturally important hosts in many countries. Ten strains from different locations collected on different years have been isolated and characterized by several methods (morphological, biochemical, genetical and molecular). Results showed that clear morphological differences exist between strains, and showing a relationship between the presence of sclerotia and pathogenicity. The conidial size and the nuclear number were highly variable between different strains. Pulsed-field gel electrophoresis showed a unique karyotype for each strain, highly polymorphic between strains and with a number of bands ranging from 4 to 8. An efficient transformation system has been achieved through the plasmid pAMPF21, containing the region AMA1 of Aspergillus nidulans. Lastly, from a genomic library the gdhA gene has been cloned. This gene produces an RNAm of 1.7 Kb and complements the deficiency on glutamate dehydrogenase activity of A. nidulans.
A crack cocaine abuser developed disseminated infection caused by a species of Conidiobolus not known to cause disease in vertebrates. The fungus gained entry via skin abrasions on the lower extremities, spread through the hematogenous route, and caused endocarditis. There was evidence of fungal infection in the lungs, heart, kidneys, skeletal muscles, and brain. An additional complication was extensive rhabdomyolysis, with a marked elevation of creatine kinase of up to 1.2 million U/L.
There is a description of equine dermatophytosis enzootic, caused by the microscopic fungus Trichophyton equinum. The disease affected 32 horses, mostly young, all in the same herd (74.4%). The diseased horses were successfully treated with the preparation Fenoform forte, applied superficially at the concentration of 0.5% of the active substance. The authors made an attempt to determine the criteria for clinical differentiation of fully developed trichophytosis and microsporosis of horses. Trichophytosis (T. equinum) is characterized as typical numerous small and round patches, covered by small, bran-like, asbestos-coloured scales. Microsporosis (M. equinum) is adequately characterized by irregularly limited patches, often overlapping (15 X 20 cm), by pronounced desquammation, and accumulation of large, lime-white scales, firmly adhering to the base. It is recommended for an exact testing of the etiology of the infection to examine the lesions microscopically and by cultivation.
BACKGROUND: Exophiala jeanselmei is a dematiaceous fungus that may cause invasive diseases, particularly among immunocompromised hosts. Most reports mention cutaneous or subcutaneous lesions, but no case of nail involvement due to this fungus has been reported until now. CASE REPORT: A 60-year-old man presented with hyperkeratosis and black coloration of the nails of the two thumbs and the two big toes of 4 years' duration. He was a renal transplant recipient and had been treated with prednisone and azathioprine. E. jeanselmei was present on direct examination, then isolated in cultures on repeated samplings from all pathologic nails. He was cured after 6 months of treatment with itraconazole. COMMENTARY: We describe the first case of nail infection due to E. jeanselmei. Itraconazole, which provides a broad spectrum of action on fungal species and achieves high levels of active substance in many tissues, including the nails, appeared to be efficient upon such a nail localization of E. jeanselmei.
Three mechanisms for disease caused by mold-infection, allergy, and toxicity-are established and well recognized by clinicians. In each case the corresponding diseases are specific to a particular fungus. The mechanisms involved include a recognized inflammatory pathology that leads to objective clinical evidence of disease. Recent widespread litigation has arisen out of an unproved assertion that exposure to indoor molds causes an ill-defined illness. This illness is characterized by the absence of objective evidence of disease and by the lack of a defined pathology. There is usually no specificity for the involved fungus purported to cause the illness. Those publications that claim such an illness are reviewed. They are found to lack scientific validity, often on the basis of faulty methodology and insufficient information. There is no coherent clinical description for the presumed illness. Recommendations are offered for published reports and studies to address this problem.
Coccidioides immitis, the primary pathogenic fungus that causes coccidioidomycosis, is most commonly found in the deserts of the southwestern United States and Central and South America. During the early 1990s, the incidence of coccidioidomycosis in California increased dramatically. Even though most infections are subclinical or self-limited, the outbreak is estimated to have cost more than $66 million in direct medical expenses and time lost from work in Kern County, California, alone. In addition to the financial loss, this pathogen causes serious and life-threatening disseminated infections, especially among the immunosuppressed, including AIDS patients. This article discusses factors that may be responsible for the increased incidence of coccidioidomycosis (e.g., climatic and demographic changes and the clinical problems of coccidioidomycosis in the immunocompromised) and new approaches to therapy and prevention.
Symbiosis between a fungus and a plant is a widespread phenomenon in nature. The outcome of such an interaction can vary in a seamless manner from mutualism to parasitism. In most cases, the host plant does not suffer, in fact it often gains an advantage from colonization by a fungus. This benefit is based on a fine-tuned balance between the demands of the invader and the plant response. If the interaction becomes unbalanced, disease symptoms appear or the fungus is excluded by induced host defence reactions. Symbioses of plants with beneficial or neutral endophytes share many common attributes with plant interactions with pathogens. Recent findings emerging from studies of compatible host-fungus interactions have enhanced our understanding of what determines whether the fungus behaves as an endophyte or a parasite and of how plants avoid exploitation by detrimental parasites but benefit from mutualistic endophytes.
Pythium aphanidermatum causes the serious disease of Pythium red blight on bentgrass. IAA, one of the metabolites that has been isolated from this fungus, showed the same symptom of Pythium red blight on bentgrass at a concentration of 1,000 mg/1. The IAA content in the foliage of bentgrass infected by this fungus was about 200 times that of an untreated control. These results suggest that IAA produced by this fungus was the causal substance of Pythium red blight on bentgrass.
Piedra (stone in Spanish) is the name given to a trichomycosis characterized by the formation of nodules resembling small stones. There are two varieties of the disease, depending on the colour of the nodules: white piedra and black piedra. Black piedra sharply differs from white piedra on three main scores: a) the causative agent is a black filamentous and sexed dematicious fungus, Piedraia hortai; b) the disease exclusively affects the scalp, and c) the geographical distribution of human black piedra is limited to tropical and subtropical areas (South America, South-East Asia). White piedra has a different aetiology, being caused by an asexual fungus, Trichosporon beigeli. The genus Trichosporon (Behrend, 1890) and the species T. beigeli (Vuillemin, 1902) were created from a case of piedra of the moustache. White piedra may involve hairy regions other than the scalp, such as the beard and moustache, less frequently the armpits, eyebrows, eyelashes and pubic hair. The disease has been observed in all continents, except Africa, and under all climates, although it is exceptionally found in cold areas (two indigenous cases in Finland). The observatio princeps of white piedra (on a false chignon) was published in 1865 by Beigel, in London. In France, only three cases, all concerning the moustache, were reported at the very beginning of this century No other case has been published in that country in the east 80 years. T. beigeli is a common saprophyte in nature. It has been found in soil, water, fruit, rotten vegetables, sawdust, as well as in man (skin, skin appendages, mucosae) and in animals (mammals, insects, mussels).(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Paracoccidioidomycosis (PCM) is a severe disease caused by the dimorphic fungus Paracoccidioides brasiliensis, which is characterized by granulomatous pulmonary and systemic lesions, affecting mainly men between 20 and 60 years of age. Reports of PCM disease in animals are rare, but the disease has been described in armadillos. On the other hand, PCM infection of domestic and wild animals detected by serological or cutaneous tests in the absence of apparent disease has been frequently reported. We present here the case of a female adult Doberman that developed cervical lymphadenomegaly. Histopathological examination of a cervical biopsy specimen revealed active PCM, with an epithelioid, granulomatous inflammation containing numerous yeast-like, multiple budding fungal forms. The diagnosis of PCM was confirmed by immunohistochemistry using a specific antibody anti-gp43 and by nested PCR using primers for the amplification of the gp43 gene region. This is the first report of PCM disease occurring in a dog, an animal that has been shown to play an important role in the natural history of North American blastomycosis.
Magnaporthe grisea is the causal agent of rice blast disease and represents a model organism for the study of fungal plant-pathogen interactions. Pathogenicity is a complex phenotype, which is carefully orchestrated by the fungus and begins with recognition and infection of the host plant, followed by growth within the plant cells, and finally dissemination to the next host and continuation of the fungal life cycle. Certain genes must condition the ability of a pathogenic fungus to infect and cause disease symptoms. To learn more about the infection process and the genes that are involved in the complex interplay between M. grisea and rice, we used an insertional mutagenesis approach to attempt to randomly disrupt all genes in the fungal genome. Two transformation approaches were used to build a library of insertion strains in M. grisea. Polyethylene glycol/CaCl2-mediated protoplast transformation was the initial method we used and resulted in the generation of just more than 17,000 insertion strain lines. Later Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated transformation was adopted and the final number of insertional mutant strains of M. grisea strain 70-15 generated was more than 57,000. Here, we describe the methods used for A. tumefaciens-mediated transformation of M. grisea and the optimized protocols we have developed to enable high-throughput fungal transformation.
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Roots from healthy and diseased mature ponderosa pine, Pinus ponderosa Laws., trees were excavated from a site near Burns, Oregon. The diseased trees were infected with black-stain root disease, Leptographium wageneri Kendrick, or annosus root disease, Heterobasidion annosum (Fr.) Bref., or both. Axial hydraulic conductivity of the roots was measured under a positive head pressure of 5 kPa, and the conducting area was stained with safranin dye to determine specific conductivity (k(s)). In diseased roots, only 8-12% of the cross-sectional xylem area conducted water. Resin-soaked xylem completely restricted water transport and accounted for 13-16% of the loss in conducting area. In roots with black-stain root disease, 17% of the loss in conducting area was associated with unstained xylem, possibly resulting from occlusions or embolisms. Based on the entire cross-sectional area of infected roots, the k(s) of roots infected with black-stain root disease was 4.6% of that for healthy roots, whereas the k(s) of roots infected with annosus root disease was 2.6% of that for healthy roots. Although these low values were partly the result of the presence of a large number of diseased roots (72%) with no conducting xylem, the k(s) of functional xylem of diseased roots was only 33% of that for healthy roots. The low k(s) values of functional xylem in diseased roots may be caused by fungus induced occlusions preceding cavitation and embolism of tracheids. The k(s) of disease-free roots from diseased trees was only 70% of that for healthy roots from healthy trees. The disease-free roots had the same mean tracheid diameter and tissue density as the healthy roots, suggesting that the lower k(s) in disease-free roots of diseased trees may also have been caused by partial xylary occlusions.