The use of chicken and insect infection models to assess the virulence of African < i > Salmonella < /i > Typhimurium ST313

by Lizeth Lacharme-Lora, Si ân V. Owen, Richard Blundell, Rocío Canals, Nicolas Wenner, Blanca Perez-Sepulveda, Wai Yee Fong, Rachel Gilroy, Paul Wigley, Jay C. D. Hinton Over recent decades,Salmonella infection research has predominantly relied on murine infection models. However, in many cases the infection phenotypes ofSalmonella pathovars in mice do not recapitulate human disease. For example,Salmonella Typhimurium ST313 is associated with enhanced invasive infection of immunocompromised people in Africa, but infection of mice and other animal models with ST313 have not consistently reproduced this invasive phenotype. The introduction of alternative infection models could help to improve the quality and reproducibility of pathogenesis research by facilitating larger-scale experiments. To investigate the virulence ofS. Typhimurium ST313 in comparison with ST19, a combination of avian and insect disease models were used. We performed experimental infections in five lines of inbred and one line of outbred chickens, as well as in the alternative chick embryo andGalleria mellonella wax moth larvae models. This extensive set of experiments identified broadly similar patterns of disease caused by the African and global pathovariants ofSalmonella Typhimurium in the chicken, the chicken embryo and insect models. A comprehensive analysis of all the chicken infection experiments revealed that the African ST313 isolate D23580 had a subtle phenotype of reduced levels of organ colon...
Source: PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases - Category: Tropical Medicine Authors: Source Type: research