Fibrinolytic drugs are commonly used for fibrin clot lysis but due to their inappropriate side effects, as well as their high costs, using fibrinolytic enzymes has been paid attention. Bacterial sources of this enzyme are a good alternative for this purpose. The aim was fibrinolysin production through screening of fibrinolysin producing bacteria from environmental samples.

The aim of the study was (1) to analyse the prevalence of P-like pA+ biotype of S. aureus in material from healthy and diseased individuals, not employed at slaughterhouses or meat processing plants, and (2) to analyse the relatedness of these strains and their genetic variability. The study included 344 strains of Staphylococcus aureus isolated from hospitalized patients with staphylococcal infections and from healthy carriers. The biotypes of S. aureus were determined on the basis of fibrinolysin and β-haemolysin production, coagulation of bovine plasma, and type of growth on crystal violet agar. Additionally, the strains were tested for the synthesis of protein A in order to distinguish between P-like pA+ and poultry biotypes. Fibrinolysin gene (sak) and methicillin resistance (mecA) were detected by means of PCR. The clonal structure of studied strains was analysed using pulsed field gel electrophoresis and sequencing of spa gene. Finally, the strains were typed with a basic set of 23 bacteriophages. The strains belonging to P-like pA+ biotype corresponded to nearly 20 % of all the studied strains. In contrast to the human biotype, they formed one clonal complex, spa-CC346/084. The P-like pA+ biotype strains did not synthesize fibrinolysin, lacked the sak gene, and showed susceptibility to methicillin. In contrast to the human biotype strains, they belonged mostly to phage group II. The P-like pA+ biotype strains, previously described solely in meat products and meat industry workers, can be also present in hospitalized patients and extra-hospital carriers. These strains form a single, fibrinolysin-negative, clonal complex t084/CC346.

Dermal wound healing involves a cascade of complex events including angiogenesis and extracellular matrix remodeling. Several groups have focused in the study of the skin wound healing activity of natural products. The phytomedicine Acheflan®, and its main active constituent is the oil from Cordia verbenacea which has known anti-inflammatory, analgesic and antimicrobial activities. To our knowledge, no investigation has evaluated the effect of Acheflan® in an experimental model of skin wound healing. The present study has explored the wound healing property of Acheflan® and has compared it with topical effectiveness of collagenase and fibrinolysin by using Wistar rat cutaneous excision wound model.

Systems biology offers considerable promise in uncovering novel pathways by which viruses and other microbial pathogens interact with host signaling and expression networks to mediate disease severity. In this study, we have developed an unbiased modeling approach to identify new pathways and network connections mediating acute lung injury, using severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) as a model pathogen. We utilized a time course of matched virologic, pathological, and transcriptomic data within a novel methodological framework that can detect pathway enrichment among key highly connected network genes. This unbiased approach produced a high-priority list of 4 genes in one pathway out of over 3,500 genes that were differentially expressed following SARS-CoV infection. With these data, we predicted that the urokinase and other wound repair pathways would regulate lethal versus sublethal disease following SARS-CoV infection in mice. We validated the importance of the urokinase pathway for SARS-CoV disease severity using genetically defined knockout mice, proteomic correlates of pathway activation, and pathological disease severity. The results of these studies demonstrate that a fine balance exists between host coagulation and fibrinolysin pathways regulating pathological disease outcomes, including diffuse alveolar damage and acute lung injury, following infection with highly pathogenic respiratory viruses, such as SARS-CoV.