Gastrointestinal colonization has been considered as the primary source of candidaemia; however, few established mouse models are available that mimic this infection route. We therefore developed a reproducible mouse model of invasive candidiasis initiated by fungal translocation and compared the virulence of six major pathogenic Candida species. The mice were fed a low-protein diet and then inoculated intragastrically with Candida cells. Oral antibiotics and cyclophosphamide were then administered to facilitate colonization and subsequent dissemination of Candida cells. Mice infected with Candida albicans and Candida tropicalis exhibited higher mortality than mice infected with the other four species. Among the less virulent species, stool titres of Candida glabrata and Candida parapsilosis were higher than those of Candida krusei and Candida guilliermondii. The fungal burdens of C. parapsilosis and C. krusei in the livers and kidneys were significantly greater than those of C. guilliermondii. Histopathologically, C. albicans demonstrated the highest pathogenicity to invade into gut mucosa and liver tissues causing marked necrosis. Overall, this model allowed analysis of the virulence traits of Candida strains in individual mice including colonization in the gut, penetration into intestinal mucosa, invasion into blood vessels, and the subsequent dissemination leading to lethal infections.
雑誌名
Scientific Reports
巻
10
号
1
ページ
3814
発行年
2020-03-20
出版者
Springer Nature
EISSN
20452322
DOI
10.1038/s41598-020-60792-y
権利
c The Author(s) 2020. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.