Dietary Modulation Alters Susceptibility to Listeria monocytogenes and Salmonella Typhimurium with or without a Gut Microbiota
Mathis Wolter, Alex Steimle, Amy Parrish, Jacques Zimmer, Mahesh S. Desai
Abstract
The human enteric pathogens Listeria monocytogenes and Salmonella Typhimurium are employed as classical models in rodent hosts to understand the pathogenesis mechanisms of foodborne pathogens. Research in the past decade has stressed the importance of the gut microbial composition in modulating susceptibility to these pathogens. The results of our study-using gnotobiotic mice and germfree control animals-additionally suggest that the dietary fiber components can dominate the impact of enteropathogenic virulence over the pathogenicity-modulating properties of the gut microbiome. The significance of our research is that there is a need to carefully choose a certain chow when performing the enteropathogen-associated mouse experiments and to cautiously match the rodent diets when trying to replicate experiments across different laboratories. Finally, our data underscore the importance of using germfree control animals to study these pathogens, as our findings would have been prone to misinterpretation in the absence of these controls.