The third national Japanese antimicrobial susceptibility pattern surveillance program: Bacterial isolates from complicated urinary tract infection patients.

The antimicrobial susceptibility patterns of bacterial pathogens isolated from patients with complicated urinary tract infections were analyzed using national surveillance data. The data consisted of 881 bacterial strains from eight clinically relevant species. The data were collected for the third national surveillance project from January 2015 to March 2016 by the Japanese Society of Chemotherapy, the Japanese Association for Infectious Disease, and the Japanese Society of Clinical Microbiology. Surveillance was undertaken with the cooperation of 41 medical institutions throughout Japan. Fluoroquinolone required a MIC90 of 2-64 mg/L to inhibit the 325 Escherichia coli strains tested and the proportion of levofloxacin resistant E. coli strains increased to 38.5% from 29.6% in 2011 and 28.6% in 2008. The proportion of levofloxacin resistant strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Enterococcus faecalis decreased from previous reports and the proportion of multidrug-resistant P. aeruginosa and carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae remained low. Among methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) strains, strains with reduced susceptibility to vancomycin (minimum inhibitory concentration, 2 µg/mL) increased to 14.7% from 5.5%. Bacterial strains that produced extended-spectrum ß-lactamase included E. coli (79 of 325 strains, 24.3%), Klebsiella pneumoniae (9 of 177 strains, 7.7%), and Proteus mirabilis (6 of 55 strains, 10.9%). The proportion of extended-spectrum ß-lactamase producing E. coli and K. pneumoniae strains increased from previous surveillance reports.

CpG hypermethylation of collagen type I alpha 2 contributes to proliferation and migration activity of human bladder cancer.

In our microarray screening of methylated genes in bladder cancer (BC), the collagen type 1 alpha 2 (COL1A2) gene was the most up-regulated among the 30,144 genes screened. We hypothesize that inactivation of the COL1A2 gene through CpG methylation contributes to proliferation and migration activity of human BC. We subjected a bladder cancer cell line (BOY) and 67 BC specimens and 10 normal bladder epitheliums (NBEs) to conventional or real-time methylation quantitative polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and to real-time reverse transcriptase (RT)-PCR. We also established a stable COL1A2 transfectant for evaluating cell proliferation and migration activity. After 5-aza-dC treatment, the expression levels of COL1A2 mRNA transcript markedly increased in BOY. Our cell proliferation assays consistently demonstrated growth inhibition in the COL1A2 transfectant compared with control and wild-type BOY cells (p<0.0001). Wound healing assays also showed significant wound healing inhibition in the COL1A2 transfectant compared to the counterparts (p=0.0016). We demonstrated by bisulfite DNA sequencing that the promoter hypermethylation of COL1A2 was a frequent event in clinical BCs. The methylation index of COL1A2 was significantly higher in the 67 BCs than in the 10 NBEs (p=0.0011). Conversely, COL1A2 mRNA transcript was significantly lower in the BCs than in the NBEs (p=0.0052). The mechanism of COL1A2 down-regulation in BC is through CpG hypermethylation of the promoter region. COL1A2 gene inactivation through CpG hypermethylation may contribute to proliferation and migration activity of BC.