Feeding behaviour of Caenorhabditis elegans is an indicator of Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1 virulence
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Author and article information
Abstract
Caenorhabditis elegans is commonly used as an infection model for pathogenesis studies in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. While the standard virulence assays rely on the slow and fast killing or paralysis of nematodes, here we developed a behaviour assay to monitor the preferred bacterial food sources of C. elegans. The type III secretion system is a well-conserved virulence trait that is not required for slow or fast killing of C. elegans. However, ΔexsE mutants that are competent for hypersecretion of ExoS, ExoT and ExoY effectors were avoided as food sources in binary assays. Conversely, mutants lacking the secretion machinery or type III effectors were preferred food sources for PAO1. In binary feeding assays, both food sources were ingested and observed in the gastrointestinal tract, but non-preferred food sources were ultimately avoided. Next we developed a high throughput feeding behaviour assay to test a library of 2370 transposon mutants in order to identify preferred food sources. After primary and secondary screens, 37 mutants were identified as preferred food sources, which included mutations in many known virulence genes and that showed reduced virulence in the slow killing assay. We propose that C. elegans feeding behaviour can be used as a sensitive indicator of virulence for bacterial strains that have moderate worm killing activity.
Cite this as
2014. Feeding behaviour of Caenorhabditis elegans is an indicator of Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1 virulence. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e313v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.313v1note This preprint is not peer-reviewed. You may wish to reference the subsequent peer-reviewed version of this article.
Sections
Additional Information
Competing Interests
There are no competing interests.
Author Contributions
Shawn Lewenza conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Laetitia Charron-Mazenod conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Lauriane Giroux conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Alexandra D Zamponi performed the experiments, analyzed the data, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Funding
This research was funded by Cystic Fibrosis Canada and with support from the Westaim-ASRA Chair in Biofilm Research, held by SL. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
