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Explaining the association between toxicity and infection severity.

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posted on 2015-09-02, 03:59 authored by Maisem Laabei, Anne-Catrin Uhlemann, Franklin D. Lowy, Eloise D. Austin, Maho Yokoyama, Khadija Ouadi, Edward Feil, Harry A. Thorpe, Barnabas Williams, Mark Perkins, Sharon J. Peacock, Stephen R. Clarke, Janina Dordel, Matthew Holden, Antonina A. Votintseva, Rory Bowden, Derrick W. Crook, Bernadette C. Young, Daniel J. Wilson, Mario Recker, Ruth C. Massey

A range of virulence assays were performed on a subset of 10 high- and 10 low-toxicity isolates from the USA300 collection to identify the biological feature that explains the observed inverse correlation between toxicity and disease severity. (A) The toxicity of the subset of isolates is provided for comparison. (B) The ability of the bacteria to invade EA.hy926 endothelial cells. (C) The ability of the bacteria to induce the release of neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs). (D) The release of proteases by the bacteria. (E) Resistance of the bacteria to human neutrophil defensin-1. (F) The ability of the bacteria to form biofilms. The p-value for the comparison between the high and low toxicity isolates was greater than 0.05 for all traits with the exception of toxicity. The medians are presented as horizontal bars, with the boxes and whiskers showing the 1st and 3rd quartile and interquartile ranges. To access this data see S3 Data.