Biofilms are at the root of many infections largely because they are much more antibiotic resistant than their planktonic counterparts. Antibiotics that target the biofilm phenotype are desperately needed, but there is still no standard method to assess biofilm drug susceptibility. Staphylococcus epidermidis ATCC 35984 biofilms treated with eight different approved antibiotics and five different experimental compounds were exposed to the oxidation reduction indicator Alamar blue for 60 min, and reduction relative to untreated controls was determined visually and spectrophotometrically. The minimum biofilm inhibitory concentration was defined as <50% reduction and a purplish well 60 min after the addition of Alamar blue. All of the approved antibiotics had biofilm MICs (MBICs) of >512 g/ml (most >4,096 g/ml), and four of the experimental compounds had MBICs of <128 g/ml. The experimental aaptamine derivative hystatin 3 was used to correlate Alamar blue reduction with 2,3-bis(2-methoxy-4-nitro-5-sulfophenyl)-2H-tetrazolium-5-carboxanilide (XTT) reduction and viable counts (CFU/ml) for S. epidermidis ATCC 35984, ATCC 12228, and two clinical isolates. For all four strains, Alamar blue results correlated well with XTT (r ‫؍‬ 0.83 to 0.97) and with CFU/ml results (r ‫؍‬ 0.85 to 0.94). Alamar blue's stability and lack of toxicity allowed CFU/ml to be determined from the same wells as Alamar blue absorbances. If the described method of microplate Alamar blue biofilm susceptibility testing, which is simple, reproducible, cost-effective, nontoxic, and amenable to high throughput, is applicable to other important biofilm forming species, it should greatly facilitate the discovery of biofilm specific agents.Given the tremendous clinical importance of biofilms, it is somewhat surprising that there is no standard method for investigating the drug susceptibility of bacterial biofilms. Several methods are available but are limited by long processing times, incompatibility with high throughput, expensive reagents or equipment, or the fact that the method measures mass instead of viability (2,4,7,13,14,24,25). For bacteria, a common method of assessing susceptibility is to quantitate the mass of biofilms by crystal violet or safranin staining, followed by extraction of bound dye with a solvent and measurement of absorption (6,24). This method provides no information about viability. Another common method of assessing bacterial biofilm susceptibility is to disrupt the biofilm by sonication, vortexing, or scraping, followed by dilution plating for determination of CFU/ml (27,28,31). This method has serious limitations; biofilm clumps can be difficult to dissociate into single-cell suspensions for plate counting, it is extremely laborious, and antibiotic carryover is a concern. For fungi, the most common method is an XTT [2,3-bis(2-methoxy-4-nitro-5-sulfophenyl)-2H-tetrazolium-5-carboxanilide] reduction assay (1,8,25), and this method has also been used for bacterial biofilms (1). While XTT reduction does measure metabolic activity,...

We conclude that ERCC1 expression levels in human tumor tissue may have a role in clinical resistance to platinum compounds. These data appear to be consistent with the assertion that ERCC1 serves as an excision nuclease, whereas ERCC2 serves as a helicase.

Xeroderma pigmentosum (XP), a genetically heterogeneous human disease, results from a defect in nucleotide excision repair of ultraviolet-damaged DNA. XP patients are extremely sensitive to sunlight and suffer from a high incidence of skin cancers. Cell fusion studies have identified seven XP complementation groups, A-G. Group D is of particular interest as mutations in this gene can also cause Cockayne's syndrome and trichothiodystrophy. The XPD gene was initially named ERCC2 (excision repair cross complementing) as it was cloned using human DNA to complement the ultraviolet sensitivity of a rodent cell line. We have purified the XPD protein to near homogeneity and show that it possesses single-stranded DNA-dependent ATPase and DNA helicase activities. We tested whether XPD can substitute for its yeast counterpart RAD3, which is essential for excision repair and for cell viability. Expression of the XPD gene in Saccharomyces cerevisiae can complement the lethality defect of a mutation in the RAD3 gene, suggesting that XPD is an essential gene in humans.

Human ERCC2 genomic clones give efficient, stable correction of the nucleotide excision repair defect in UV5 Chinese hamster ovary cells. One clone having a breakpoint just 5′ of classical promoter elements corrects only transiently, implicating further flanking sequences in stable gene expression. The nucleotide sequences of a cDNA clone and genomic flanking regions were determined. The ERCC2 translated amino acid sequence has 52% identity (73% homology) with the yeast nucleotide excision repair protein RAD3. RAD3 is essential for cell viability and encodes a protein that is a single‐stranded DNA dependent ATPase and an ATP dependent helicase. The similarity of ERCC2 and RAD3 suggests a role for ERCC2 in both cell viability and DNA repair and provides the first insight into the biochemical function of a mammalian nucleotide excision repair gene.

The UV-sensitive Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cell line UV5, which is defective in the incision step of nucleotide excision repair, was used to identify and clone a complementing human gene, ERCC2, and to study the repair process. Genomic DNA from a human-hamster hybrid cell line was sheared and cotransferred with pSV2gpt plasmid DNA into UV5 ceUs to obtain five primary transformants. Transfer of sheared DNA from one primary transformant resulted in a secondary transformant expressing both gpt and ERCC2. The human repair gene was identified with a probe for Alu-family repetitive sequences. For most primary, secondary, and cosmid transformants, survival after UV exposure showed a return to wild-type levels of resistance. The levels of UV-induced mutation at the aprt locus for secondary and cosmid transformants varied from 50 to 130% of the wild-type level. Measurements of the initial rate of UV-induced strand incision by alkaine elution indicated that, whereas the UV5 rate was 3% of the wild-type level, rates of cosmid-transformed lines were similar to that of the wild type, and the secondary transformant rate was about 165% of the wild-type rate. Analysis of overlapping cosmids determined that ERCC2 is between 15.5 and 20 kilobases and identified a closely linked gpt gene. Cosmids were obtained with functional copies of both ERCC2 and gpt. ERCC2 corrects only the first of the five CHO complementation groups of incision-defective mutants.