All compounds in this series induced large increases in expression of the gene encoding VraX, a highly conserved 55-amino acid staphylococcal polypeptide of unknown function; its rate of transcription is substantially increased in the presence of cell wall-active antibiotics. This gene is under the control of the VraS/R regulator system and the genes encoding the response regulator and the sensor histidine kinase were also incrementally up-regulated in line with vraX expression. Deletion of vraX appears to have no detectable impact on the staphylococcal phenotype and we have proposed, based on in silico modelling, that VraX is produced in order to sequester b-lactam agents before they are able to gain access to their target within the bacterial envelope. In the current study, vraX was massively up-regulated by catechin gallates soon after exposure and would appear to be an early warning of lethal and non-lethal cell envelope AM2394 perturbation. ECg is rapidly degraded in vivo due to the susceptibility of the ester linkage that joins the C-ring with the galloyl D-ring; a combination of some of the structural modifications described herein combined with substitution of an amide function for the degradable ester link could yield stable bioactive lead compounds with the capacity to alter the course of systemic staphylococcal infections when combined with conventional b-lactam antibiotics that have lost clinical utility due to the emergence of drug resistance. The migration of juvenile salmonids downriver on the Columbia and Snake Rivers has been contested to be compromised due to the multiple hydropower facilities located on these rivers. Physical injury resulting from impacts with spillway structures and turbines and hydraulic forces associated with spill and sudden depth changes are two main hazards associated with hydropower-related passage. Laboratory studies of the effect of exposure to severe hydraulic events on juvenile salmonids have found a variety of adverse effects caused by strike, shear, pressure gradients, AM580 and disorientation. Recent studies have also found that fish exposed to high shear and turbulence are subject to direct injury and are more susceptible to predation than migrating fish which have non-turbulent passage. Current efforts to assess these and strike-related injuries are performed using a direct injury and mortality approach by gross observation up to 48 hours post passage or condition treatment. Subacute injuries are not routinely measured as there is no available metric to determine non-visible injuries short of assessments for disorientation following laboratory treatment, and this type of observation is not used in field studies for testing hydropower structure configurations. Injury-based biomarkers may serve as quantitative indicators of injury severity. Because head injury likely results from physical trauma, such as impacting a physical structure or extreme high velocities, the development of a biomarker assay to quickly assess subacute physical injury and recovery is essential to determine the impact of hydropower structures on fish health. Recent advances in biomedical research have resulted in the development of a specific mammalian biomarker to rapidly assess traumatic brain injury. Breakdown products of the cytoskeletal protein aII spectrin are produced following either calpain and/or caspase proteolysis; each digestion giving rise to different sized spectrin breakdown products.