30 All antifungal agents studied here, regardless of the concentration used, failed to reduce the colony count of viable cells within the biofilms. Although amphotericin B and CAS are determined as fungicidal substances against planktonic cells of Candida spp., no tested antifungal agents showed fungicidal effect defined as >95% killing on biofilm in any of the three development phases. To our knowledge, only one study reported a good correlation between XTT assay and total viable Candida cell counts.31 selleck chemicals llc However,

this study published by Ramage et al. showed a correlation between XTT assay and killing curves with a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.9667 for CAS and a fungicidal activity for and

amphotericin B. Fungicidal effects were not observed in our study, but in contrast to Ramage et al. who used a comparably low inoculum of 102 cells/ml,31 densely packed biofilms with inoculum size of 106/ml were used. In conclusion, regardless of the tested development phase, CAS showed distinct activity against C. albicans biofilms particularly at low concentrations. Amphotericin B exhibited a concentration-dependent activity. Posaconazole achieved a reduction on C. albicans biofilm by 20–35%. However, in contrast to CDK activation previous study published by Chandra et al. [11], who showed decrease in the activity of antifungal agents against C. albicans biofilm over time, we found no correlation between antifungal activity and phase of biofilm development. Although no significant difference in metabolic activity of untreated Candida biofilm was found using XTT assay, 48 h-old biofilms were more resistant against amphotericin B and CAS than 24-h or 72-h old biofilms. Due to multifactorial genesis of drug resistance in Candida biofilm,7 it may be hypothesised that several resistance mechanisms may be consequently activated over the time of biofilm development, e.g. time-dependent production of quorum sensing molecules, activation of efflux

pumps, alterations in cell wall assembly and at last, the presence of ‘persister cells’ against CAS and amphotericin oxyclozanide B. Three efflux pump genes MDR1, CDR1 and CDR2 that contribute to fluconazole resistance are activated at early times in biofilm development23,32 and stay expressed during the biofilm development. We suppose that some of these mechanisms of resistance may be responsible for resistance also against new azole, POS. Further studies are needed to elucidate the role of these mechanisms during the development of C. albicans biofilms during the exposure to POS. “
“The molecular characterization of Malassezia spp. isolates from animals and humans has not been thoroughly studied. We have analysed the DNA profile by random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD)–PCR to compare the genetic diversity between isolates from the external ears of cattle, dogs and humans.