Affiliation:
1. Centre for Genetics and Genomics, School of Biology, University of Nottingham, Medical School, Queen's Medical Centre, Nottingham NG7 2UH, United Kingdom
2. School of Veterinary Medicine and Science, University of Nottingham, Sutton Bonington Campus, Leicestershire LE12 5RD, United Kingdom
Abstract
ABSTRACT
Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus
is a bacterium which preys upon and kills Gram-negative bacteria, including the zoonotic pathogens
Escherichia coli
and
Salmonella. Bdellovibrio
has potential as a biocontrol agent, but no reports of it being tested in living animals have been published, and no data on whether
Bdellovibrio
might spread between animals are available. In this study, we tried to fill this knowledge gap, using
B. bacteriovorus
HD100 doses in poultry with a normal gut microbiota or predosed with a colonizing
Salmonella
strain. In both cases,
Bdellovibrio
was dosed orally along with antacids. After dosing non-
Salmonella
-infected birds with
Bdellovibrio
, we measured the health and well-being of the birds and any changes in their gut pathology and culturable microbiota, finding that although a
Bdellovibrio
dose at 2 days of age altered the overall diversity of the natural gut microbiota in 28-day-old birds, there were no adverse effects on their growth and well-being. Drinking water and fecal matter from the pens in which the birds were housed as groups showed no contamination by
Bdellovibrio
after dosing. Predatory
Bdellovibrio
orally administered to birds that had been predosed with a gut-colonizing
Salmonella enterica
serovar Enteritidis phage type 4 strain (an important zoonotic pathogen) significantly reduced
Salmonella
numbers in bird gut cecal contents and reduced abnormal cecal morphology, indicating reduced cecal inflammation, compared to the ceca of the untreated controls or a nonpredatory Δ
pilA
strain, suggesting that these effects were due to predatory action. This work is a first step to applying
Bdellovibrio
therapeutically for other animal, and possibly human, infections.
Publisher
American Society for Microbiology
Subject
Ecology,Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology,Food Science,Biotechnology
Cited by
146 articles.
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