Prevalence of human papillomavirus types in women with pre-neoplastic and neoplastic cervical lesions in the Federal District of Brazil

As a contribution to the public health authorities in planning prophylactic and therapeutic vaccine strategies, we describe the prevalence of human papillomavirus (HPV) types in women presenting abnormal cytological results in Pap smear screening tests in the Federal District, Central Brazil. We studied 129 cervical scraping samples from women whose cytological tests showed either pre-neoplastic or neoplastic lesions. Amplification of HPV DNA was performed by polymerase chain reaction using consensus primers MY09 and MY11 followed by identification of isolates by restriction fragment length polymorphism. We detected HPV DNA in 62% of the samples, including HPV-16 in 43.8%, HPV-58 in 12.5%, HPV-31 in 10%, HPV-53 in 6.3%, each of HPV-18 and HPV-33 in 3.8% of the isolates. Other types (HPV-35, -52, -66, -CP8304, -6, -11, and -CP8061) were less frequent (= or < 2.5% each). The prevalence of HPV-58 was relatively higher in this population than in data in South America, but similar to results obtained in other studies in Latin America, Europe, and Eastern Asia. Case-control studies need to be carried out to establish the association between the prevalence of HPV types specially the less frequent high-risk types and cervical cancer

Biotechnological production and application of the antibiotic pimaricin: biosynthesis and its regulation

Pimaricin (natamycin) is a small polyene macrolide antibiotic used worldwide. This efficient antimycotic and antiprotozoal agent, produced by several soil bacterial species of the genus Streptomyces, has found application in human therapy, in the food and beverage industries and as pesticide. It displays a broad spectrum of activity, targeting ergosterol but bearing a particular mode of action different to other polyene macrolides. The biosynthesis of this only antifungal agent with a GRAS status has been thoroughly studied, which has permitted the manipulation of producers to engineer the biosynthetic gene clusters in order to generate several analogues. Regulation of its production has been largely unveiled, constituting a model for other polyenes and setting the leads for optimizing the production of these valuable compounds. This review describes and discusses the molecular genetics, uses, mode of action, analogue generation, regulation and strategies for increasing pimaricin production yields