Burn wounds are often complicated by bacterial infection, contributing to morbidity and mortality. Agents commonly used to treat burn wound infection are limited by toxicity, incomplete microbial coverage, inadequate penetration, and rising resistance. Curcumin is a naturally derived substance with innate antimicrobial and wound healing properties. Acting by multiple mechanisms, curcumin is less likely than current antibiotics to select for resistant bacteria. Curcumin's poor aqueous solubility and rapid degradation profile hinder usage; nanoparticle encapsulation overcomes this pitfall and enables extended topical delivery of curcumin. In this study, we synthesized and characterized curcumin nanoparticles (curc-np), which inhibited in vitro growth of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Pseudomonas aeruginosa in dose-dependent fashion, and inhibited MRSA growth and enhanced wound healing in an in vivo murine wound model. Curc-np may represent a novel topical antimicrobial and wound healing adjuvant for infected burn wounds and other cutaneous injuries.

The opportunistic fungal pathogen Candida glabrata is a frequent cause of candidiasis, causing infections ranging from superficial to life-threatening disseminated disease. The inherent tolerance of C. glabrata to azole drugs makes this pathogen a serious clinical threat. To identify novel genes implicated in antifungal drug tolerance, we have constructed a large-scale C. glabrata deletion library consisting of 619 unique, individually bar-coded mutant strains, each lacking one specific gene, all together representing almost 12% of the genome. Functional analysis of this library in a series of phenotypic and fitness assays identified numerous genes required for growth of C. glabrata under normal or specific stress conditions, as well as a number of novel genes involved in tolerance to clinically important antifungal drugs such as azoles and echinocandins. We identified 38 deletion strains displaying strongly increased susceptibility to caspofungin, 28 of which encoding proteins that have not previously been linked to echinocandin tolerance. Our results demonstrate the potential of the C. glabrata mutant collection as a valuable resource in functional genomics studies of this important fungal pathogen of humans, and to facilitate the identification of putative novel antifungal drug target and virulence genes.