Browsing by Subject "XDR"

The lower respiratory infection tuberculosis (TB) has been the leading cause of death for centuries causing millions of deaths worldwide. The development of antibiotic therapy has reduced the morbidity and mortality during the 20th century, at least in the developed countries. However, tuberculosis is still the world's second leading cause of death from infectious diseases. Although TB can be treated and even cured with drug therapy, the treatment is extremely long and requires 6-9 months constant drug therapy. This prolonged treatment causes poor patient compliance, which is usually the reason for the selection of drug resistant and often multidrug (MDR-TB) or even extensively drug-resistant (XDR-TB) TB bacteria. Limitations of available therapies and the emergence of drug-resistant strains have intensified the search for new drugs from natural sources. Marine micro- and macro-organisms have proven to be an excellent source of structurally unique biologically active natural products. EU FP7 -funded MAREX project, launched in 2010, aims at identifying new biologically active compounds from marine sources. This Master's thesis was carried out as a part of the MAREX project. The aim of this study was to optimize and validate a reproducible method to determine antimicrobial activity of natural products against Mycobacterium smegmatis, which is a widely used non-pathogenic surrogate model for TB. In the present study, spectrophotometric microplate assay was optimized and validated using existing antibacterial agents ciprofloxacin and rifampicin as reference compounds. The assay was performed on 96-well plate by using two detection techniques, absorbance measurement and a colorimetric indicator, for the antibacterial MIC end-point determination. The results obtained by the described methods were compared with each other in order to achieve the most optimal assay conditions. The quality control parameters S/B, S/N and Z' factor were used in order to determine the optimal experimental conditions for the assay. Obtaining reliable results with the turbidimetric method required incubation for two days in the case of ciprofloxacin, and for five days with rifampicin. Colorimetric measurement led to similar results as the turbidimetric measurement for both of the reference compounds. The method was further used for the screening of a group of marine extracts. None of the 21 samples tested showed significant activity against M. smegmatis.