Typical enteropathogenic Escherichia coli (tEPEC), a causative agent of watery diarrhoea in infants, has been scarcely studied in vivo due to the lack of a suitable small animal model. Taking advantage of our recently established murine neonatal infection model [1], we analysed the formation of A/E lesions and deciphered the intestinal epithelial host response upon infection with different clinical isolates as well as with the type strain E2348/69. Interestingly, despite a similar degree of gut colonization, the number of attaching and effacing (A/E) lesions and the intensity of the epithelial host response varied greatly between the different tEPEC strains. As our mouse model controls for variations in host genetics and environmental factors, our data suggest that EPEC interaction with the host mucosa is strongly modulated by yet unidentified bacterial factors in vivo. In addition, our study highlights the heterogeneity of clinical EPEC isolates and illustrates the importance to study many representative EPEC strains to better understand EPEC pathogenesis and develop appropriate therapeutics.

References

[1] Dupont et al., PLoS Pathog., 2016, 12(5):e1005616