Velikova, Nadya and Kavanagh, Kevin and Wells, Jerry M. (2016) Evaluation of Galleria mellonella larvae for studying the virulence of Streptococcus suis. BMC Microbiology, 16 (291). ISSN 1471-2180

Preview

Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

Background: Streptococcus suis is an encapsulated Gram-positive bacterium and the leading cause of sepsis and meningitis in young pigs, resulting in considerable economic losses in the porcine industry. S. suis is considered an emerging zoonotic agent with increasing numbers of human cases over the last years. In the environment, both avirulent and virulent strains occur in pigs, with no evidence for consistent adapatation of virulent strains to the human host. Currently, there is an urgent need for a convenient, reliable and standardised animal model to rapidly assess S. suis virulence. Wax moth (Galleria mellonella) larvae have successfully been used in human and animal infectious disease studies. Here, we developed G. mellonella larvae as a model to assess virulence of S. suis strains. Results: Fourteen isolates of S. suis belonging to different serotypes killed G. mellonella larvae in a dose-dependent manner. Larvae infected with the virulent serotype 2 strain, S. suis S3881/S10, were rescued by antibiotic therapy. Crucially, the observed virulence of the different serotypes and mutants was in agreement with virulence observed in piglets (Sus scrofa) and the zebrafish larval infection model. Infection with heat-inactivated bacteria or bacteria-free culture supernatants showed that in most cases live bacteria are needed to cause mortality in G. mellonella. Conclusions: The G. mellonella model is simple, cost-efficient, and raises less ethical issues than experiments on vertebrates and reduces infrastructure requirements. Furthermore, it allows experiments to be performed at the host temperature (37 °C). The results reported here, indicate that the G. mellonella model may aid our understanding of veterinary microbial pathogens such as the emerging zoonotic pathogen S. suis and generate hypotheses for testing in the target animal host. Ultimately, this might lead to the timely introduction of new effective remedies for infectious diseases. Last but not least, use of the G. mellonella infection model to study S. suis virulence adheres to the principles of replacement, reduction and refinement (3Rs) and can potentially reduce the number of vertebrates used for experimental infection studies.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© The Author(s). 2016 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
Keywords:	Streptococcus suis; Galleria mellonella; Virulence; Reduction and refinement (3Rs); Infection model;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Science and Engineering > Biology
Item ID:	11084
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1186/s12866-016-0905-2
Depositing User:	Dr. Kevin Kavanagh
Date Deposited:	24 Sep 2019 13:43
Journal or Publication Title:	BMC Microbiology
Publisher:	BMC
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	https://bmcmicrobiol.biomedcentral.com/
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

Repository Staff Only(login required)

Item control page

Downloads

Origin of downloads