In the search for new marine derived antibiotics, 43 epi- and endophytic fungal strains were isolated from the surface or the inner tissue of different marine plants and invertebrates. Through preliminary and secondary screening, 10 of them were found to be able to produce broad-spectrum antimicrobial metabolites. By morphological and molecular biological methods, three active strains were characterized to be Penicillium glabrum, Fusarium oxysporum, and Alternaria alternata.

BackgroundPathogens identification is critical for the proper diagnosis and precise treatment of infective endocarditis (IE). Although blood and valve cultures are the gold standard for IE pathogens detection, many cases are culture-negative, especially in patients who had received long-term antibiotic treatment, and precise diagnosis has therefore become a major challenge in the clinic. Metagenomic sequencing can provide both information on the pathogenic strain and the antibiotic susceptibility profile of patient samples without culturing, offering a powerful method to deal with culture-negative cases.MethodsTo assess the feasibility of a metagenomic approach to detect the causative pathogens in resected valves from IE patients, we employed both next-generation sequencing and Oxford Nanopore Technologies MinION nanopore sequencing for pathogens and antimicrobial resistance detection in seven culture-negative IE patients. Using our in-house developed bioinformatics pipeline, we analyzed the sequencing results generated from both platforms for the direct identification of pathogens from the resected valves of seven clinically culture-negative IE patients according to the modified Duke criteria.ResultsOur results showed both metagenomics methods can be applied for the causative pathogen detection in all IE samples. Moreover, we were able to simultaneously characterize respective antimicrobial resistance features.ConclusionMetagenomic methods for IE detection can provide clinicians with valuable information to diagnose and treat IE patients after valve replacement surgery. However, more efforts should be made to optimize protocols for sample processing, sequencing and bioinformatics analysis.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12941-018-0294-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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When the Bank of England introduced quantitative easing (QE) it emphasised effects on money and credit, but much of its empirical research has focused on effects on long‐term interest rates. We use the flow of funds to analyse the implications of QE for broad money, and argue that the financial crisis, fiscal expansion and QE may have constituted major exogenous shocks to money. Regressions in which the growth of nominal spending depends on the growth of nominal money and other variables suggest that money has had a much larger role in the period of the crisis and QE.

Pathogens identification is critical for the proper diagnosis and precise treatment of infective endocarditis. Although blood and valve cultures are the gold standard for IE pathogens detection, many cases are culture-negative, especially in patients who had received long-term antibiotic treatment, and precise diagnosis has therefore become a major challenge in the clinic. Metagenomic sequencing can provide both information on the pathogenic strain and the antibiotic susceptibility profile of patient samples without culturing, offering a powerful method to deal with culture-negative cases. In this work, we assessed the feasibility of a metagenomic approach to detect the causative pathogens in resected valves from IE patients.Using our in-house developed bioinformatics pipeline, we analyzed the sequencing results generated from both next-generation sequencing and Oxford Nanopore Technologies MinION nanopore sequencing for the direct identification of pathogens from the resected valves of seven clinically culture-negative IE patients according to the modified Duke criteria. Moreover, we were able to simultaneously characterize respective antimicrobial resistance features. This provides clinicians with valuable information to diagnose and treat IE patients after valve replacement surgery.