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



Lacharme-Lora, Lizeth, Owen, Sian V ORCID: 0000-0001-5330-3177, Blundell, Richard, Canals, Rocio ORCID: 0000-0001-7079-7690, Wenner, Nicolas, Perez-Sepulveda, Blanca, Fong, Wai Yee ORCID: 0000-0002-9868-6295, Gilroy, Rachel, Wigley, Paul and Hinton, Jay CD ORCID: 0000-0003-2671-6026
(2019) The use of chicken and insect infection models to assess the virulence of African Salmonella Typhimurium ST313. PLOS NEGLECTED TROPICAL DISEASES, 13 (7). e0007540-.

Access the full-text of this item by clicking on the Open Access link.
Official URL: https://plos.org/

Abstract

Over recent decades, Salmonella infection research has predominantly relied on murine infection models. However, in many cases the infection phenotypes of Salmonella 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 of S. 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 and Galleria mellonella wax moth larvae models. This extensive set of experiments identified broadly similar patterns of disease caused by the African and global pathovariants of Salmonella 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 colonisation in inbred chickens, relative to ST19 strain 4/74. ST313 isolate D23580 also caused reduced mortality in chicken embryos and insect larvae, when compared with ST19 4/74. We conclude that these three infection models do not reproduce the characteristics of the systemic disease caused by S. Typhimurium ST313 in humans.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: Chick Embryo, Animals, Chickens, Moths, Salmonella typhimurium, Salmonella Infections, Animal, Disease Models, Animal, Reproducibility of Results, Virulence, Larva, Africa, Insecta
Depositing User: Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited: 08 Aug 2019 15:51
Last Modified: 19 Jan 2023 00:35
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pntd.0007540
Open Access URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1...
Related URLs:
URI: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3051301