Generating super-shedders: co-infection increases bacterial load and egg production of a gastrointestinal helminth

Lass, Sandra; Hudson, Peter J.; Thakar, Juilee; Saric, Jasmina; Harvill, Eric; Albert, Réka; Perkins, Sarah E.

Furthermore, traditional infection models have required host sacrifice to quantify bacterial load from individual host organs during infection. This typically involves sacrificing at least three mice at set time points during an experiment. As such, daily measurements of infection load are often not ethically possible owing to the large number of mice that would be required to run such an experiment. BLI, however, provides a unique opportunity to longitudinally monitor infection in a single host over a fine temporal scale (in our case daily). In addition, because imaging occurs in vivo and light is emitted when the bacteria are metabolically active the counts observed may be a better reflection of actual bacterial numbers than other in vivo techniques such as gfpreporters and traditional techniques such as counting CFUs on growth media.