Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Abstract

The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans may be killed by certain pathogenic bacteria and thus is a model organism for studying interactions between bacteria and animal hosts. However, growing nematodes on prey bacteria may influence their susceptibility to potential pathogens. A method of axenic nematode culture was developed to isolate and quantify interactions between C. elegans and potentially pathogenic strains of the Burkholderia cepacia complex. Studying these dynamics in liquid solution rather than on agar surfaces minimized nematode avoidance behavior and resolved more differences among isolates. Most isolates of B. cenocepacia, B. ambifaria and B. cepacia caused 60-80% mortality of nematodes after 7 days, whereas isolates of B. multivorans caused less mortality (

Department

Molecular, Cellular and Biomedical Sciences

Publication Date

11-23-2009

Journal Title

PLoS One

Publisher

Public Library of Science

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1371/journal.pone.0007961

Document Type

Article

Rights

© 2009 Cooper et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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Biology Commons

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