Nystatin, Thermo Scientific Chemicals

Description

Nystatin which acts a polyene antifungal and antibiotic which increases membrane permeability. Nystatin is used to treat fungal infections of the skin, mouth, vagina, and intestinal tract. Fungal medicines will not work for colds, flu, or other viral infections.

This Thermo Scientific Chemicals brand product was originally part of the Alfa Aesar product portfolio. Some documentation and label information may refer to the legacy brand. The original Alfa Aesar product / item code or SKU reference has not changed as a part of the brand transition to Thermo Scientific Chemicals.

General Description

• Nystatin is a polyene compound that shows anti-bacterial and antifungal activities against Streptomyces noursei, Streptomyces aureus, and other Streptomyces species
• It is also an ionophore with the capacity to increase membrane permeability
• Nystatin is a channel-forming ionophore and exerts its activity via formation of a membrane-spanning pore in the fungal plasma membrane, thus altering membrane permeability, allowing the leakage of intracellular contents, and the subsequent disruption of electrochemical gradients essential for proper cell function

Applications

• In in vitro experiments, Nystatin is an antifungal that is both fungistatic and fungicidal against a wide variety of yeasts and yeast-like fungi
• It has a higher selectivity for fungal cells over mammalian cells since nystatin presents greater binding affinity with ergosterol, a key sterol found in fungal cell walls, as opposed to its mammalian counterpart, cholesterol
• This compound is not active against organisms that do not contain sterols in their cell membrane (for example, bacteria)
• It is used on human macrophage cell line U937, to study its effect on the production of interleukin-8 by silver nanoparticle-treated U937 cell line
• It has the ability to prevent cell culture contamination as well as induce interleukin-1 and -8, and tumor necrosis factor α secretion in TLR2-expressing THP1 cells
• It modulates lipid raft profile in mice macrophages