Proteolytic activity and cooperative hemolytic effect of dermatophytes with different species of bacteria

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE

Globally, dermatophytes are the most common filamentous group of fungi causing cutaneous mycoses. Dermatophytes were shown to secrete a multitude of enzymes that play a role in their pathogenesis. There is limited data on co-hemolytic (CAMP-like) effect of different bacterial species on dermatophyte species. In this study, we sought to the evaluate exoenzyme activity and co-hemolytic effect of four bacteria on clinical dermatophytes isolated from patients in Shiraz, Iran.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

A total of 84 clinical dermatophyte species were isolated from patients suffering dermatophytosis and identified by conventional methods. Hemolytic activity was evaluated with Columbia 5% sheep blood agar. Proteolytic activity was determined by plate clearance assay method, using gelatin 8% agar. CAMP-like factor was evaluated with four bacteria, namely, S. areus, S.saprophyticus, S.pyogenes, and S.agalactiae. Fisher's exact test was run for statistical analysis.

RESULTS

T. mentagrophytes was the most predominant agent (27 [32.1%]) followed by T. verrucosum(20 [23.8%]), T. tonsurans (10 [11.9%]), Microsporum canis (7 [8.3%]), T. rubrum (6 [7.1%]), E. floccosum (6 [7.1%]), M. gypseum (5 [6%]), and T. violaceum (3[3.6%]). The most common clinical area of dermatophytosis was the skin. All the isolates expressed the zone of incomplete alpha hemolysis. All the isolates had CAMP- positive reaction with S. aureus and the other bacteria were CAMP-negative. All the isolates expressed proteolytic activity and no significant differences were noted among diverse genera of dermatophytes and severities of proteolytic activity.

CONCLUSION

This study indicated that hemolysin and proteolytic enzymes potentially play a role in dermatophyte pathogenesis and S. aureus could be considered as a main bacterium for creation of co-hemolytic effect in association with dermatophyte species.

Effects of phonetic context on audio-visual intelligibility of French

Bimodal perception leads to better speech understanding than auditory perception alone. We evaluated the overall benefit of lip-reading on natural utterances of French produced by a single speaker. Eighteen French subjects with good audition and vision were administered a closed set identification test of VCVCV nonsense words consisting of three vowels [i, a, y] and six consonants [b, v, z, 3, R, l]. Stimuli were presented under both auditory and audio-visual conditions with white noise added at various signal-to-noise ratios. Identification scores were higher in the bimodal condition than in the auditory-alone condition, especially in situations where acoustic information was reduced. The auditory and audio-visual intelligibility of the three vowels [i, a, y] averaged over the six consonantal contexts was evaluated as well. Two different hierarchies of intelligibility were found. Auditorily, [a] was most intelligible, followed by [i] and then by [y]; whereas visually [y] was most intelligible, followed by [a] and [i]. We also quantified the contextual effects of the three vowels on the auditory and audio-visual intelligibility of the consonants. Both the auditory and the audio-visual intelligibility of surrounding consonants was highest in the [a] context, followed by the [i] context and lastly the [y] context.