“…This problem has been approached in vitro either by incubating purulent material with gentamicin (Bryant & Hammond, 1974;Davis & Bruns, 1978) or, by testing different groups of purified macromolecules for gentamicin (Deguchi, Ishii & Tanaka, 1978) or neomycin (Potter, Matthews el ai, 1965) binding activity. An intermediate approach was to study the binding of gentamicin to subcellular fractions of noninfected organs or tissues (Kunin, 1970;Komguth, Bayer & Kunin, 1980). The clinical relevance of these studies is as yet uncertain, because most of the results on gentamicin binding have been obtained under somewhat unphysiological conditions: either the gentamicin binding assays were performed in salt buffers of too low an ionic strength (Bryant & Hammond, 1974;Kornguth et ai, 1980), or the binding was assessed after the purulent samples had been strongly homogenized (Bryant & Hammond, 1974;Davis & Bruns, 1978).…”