• DOI:10.1111/j.1749-6632.1971.tb30668.x
• Corpus ID: 37671568

ACTIVITY OF DISTAMYCIN A ON THE TRANSFER OF DRUG RESISTANCE IN GRAM‐NEGATIVE CLINICAL ISOLATES

@article{Sanfilippo1971ACTIVITYOD,
  title={ACTIVITY OF DISTAMYCIN A ON THE TRANSFER OF DRUG RESISTANCE IN GRAM‐NEGATIVE CLINICAL ISOLATES},
  author={Aurora Sanfilippo},
  journal={Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences},
  year={1971},
  volume={182}
}

• A. Sanfilippo
• Published 1 June 1971
• Biology
• Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

The problem of transferable drug resistance of pathogenic bacteria is of great importance because of its clinical and epidemiological implications. Since Japanese workers1 found that resistance to several drugs can be transferred from one bacterium to another during cell-to-cell contact, many reports have appeared all over the world regarding this phen~menon.”~ The infectious type of resistance is especially frequent among gram-negative bacteria among which the spread of resistance to the main antibiotics has become more and more alarming.cg The possibility of selectively inhibiting resistance transfer has been studied by several workers, and some drugs were found to be capable of interfering with the resistance transfer processes either by a curing activity on the episomes (acridine and rifampicin15) or by inhibiting some metabolic processes necessary for the transfer of the resistance factors (nalidixic acid16J7 and clindamycinl*). The aim of the present work is to study the activity of the antiviral antibiotic distamycin on the transfer of drug resistance in some strains of gramnegative clinical isolates. Distamycin A is an antibiotic isolated from the fermentation broth of Streptomyces distallicus and subsequently prepared by total chemical synthesis. The structural formula is given in FIGURE 1. Distamycin A is known to display inhibiting activity against coliphageszO as well as against some animal DNA viruses.21aZ2 Another interesting feature of distamycin A is its capacity to prevent the induction of bacterial adaptive enzymes of E. coli2a.z4 without affecting the growth of the viability of the bacteria when they do not depend on the synthesis of adaptive enzymes. Recent worksz5 demonstrated that distamycin A is bound to DNA and that this binding results in a decrease of the template activity of DNA for DNA synthesis in a cell-free system.z6 These findings suggest the hypothesis of a possible interference of distamycin A with the resistance transfer processes.