Disentangling bacterial invasiveness from lethality in an experimental host-pathogen system.

ABSTRACT: Quantifying virulence remains a central problem in human health, pest control, disease ecology, and evolutionary biology. Bacterial virulence is typically quantified by the LT50 (i.e., the time taken to kill 50% of infected hosts); however, such an indicator cannot account for the full complexity of the infection process, such as distinguishing between the pathogen's ability to colonize versus kill the hosts. Indeed, the pathogen needs to breach the primary defenses in order to colonize, find a suitable environment to replicate, and finally express the virulence factors that cause disease. Here, we show that two virulence attributes, namely pathogen lethality and invasiveness, can be disentangled from the survival curves of a laboratory population of Caenorhabditis elegans ne

SUBMITTER: Biancalani T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6558951 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature