The genus Enterococcus is composed of 38 species, the most important of which are Enterococcus faecalis and Enterococcus faecium-both human intestinal colonizers. Hospitals within the United States and around the world commonly isolate these bacteria because they are a cause of bacteremia, urinary tract infections (UTIs), endocarditis, wound infections, meningitis, intraabdominal and pelvic infections, and nosocomial and iatrogenic infections. Given the ubiquity of enterococci within the human population, it is important for laboratories to be able to distinguish these agents within hospitalized patients from other bacterial genera and also differentiate different species within the Enterococcus genus as well as different strains within each species. Unfortunately, the enterococci are emerging as serious pathogens in both the developed world, where surveillance needs to be improved and speciation procedures are inadequate or cumbersome, and in developing nations, which lack the trained hospital personnel or funding to sufficiently identify enterococci to the genus or species level. This review explores the Enterococcus genus and highlights some of the concerns for national and international clinical microbiology laboratories.

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Clinical myocardial involvement in systemic lupus erythematosus is rare. Lupus myocarditis is usually not detected until significant decrease in myocardial function becomes clinically evident. This case report describes MR imaging of lupus myocarditis that was used for diagnosis and follow up in a patient who declined cardiac biopsy. We also review the literature related to myocardial imaging by MRI.

One of the major goals of the human genome project is to establish a physical map of each human chromosome with a density of sequence-tagged site (STS) markers exceeding one every 100 kb. We report here the generation of a human chromosome 5-specific radiation hybrid (RH) map that includes 556 markers. Of these markers, 132 loci are ordered with a maximum likelihood ratio of >1000:1 compared with the next most likely order. An additional 113 loci were ordered relative to these backbone markers with a maximum likelihood ratio of >10:1 but <1000:1. Together, these 245 loci form an ordered framework map for the chromosome. Using this framework, >300 more markers were localized based on two-point analysis with the ordered set. On average, there are 50 markers in common with the RH map presented here and other chromosome 5 maps included in the current whole genome cytogenetic, genetic, and physical maps. The accuracy of all the maps is evident in that there are no more than two discrepancies between any one of them and these data. All of the maps encompassing chromosome 5 complement each other providing excellent STS coverage with >2200 loci combined. The chromosome 5-specific RH map contains 20% of these independent loci. In addition, our RH map contains STSs derived from clones suitable for fluorescent in situ hybridization, allowing alignment to the cytogenetic map. Together, these maps will assist in the assembly of sequence-ready contigs and will aid in the identification of disease loci on chromosome 5 by positional cloning and positional candidate approaches.[The STS sequences described in this paper have been submitted to dbSTS under accession nos. G15666–G15715 andG16049–G16063. A complete map of human chromosome 5 is available as an on-line supplement at http://www.cshl.org/gr.]