Creasey Hannah N, Zhang Wen, Widmer Giovanni
Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, Tufts University, North Grafton, MA 01536, USA.
Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition, Tufts University, Boston, MA 02111, USA.
Microorganisms. 2022 Jun 17;10(6):1242. doi: 10.3390/microorganisms10061242.
Cryptosporidiosis is an enteric infection caused by several protozoan species in the genus (phylum Apicomplexa). Immunosuppressed mice are commonly used to model this infection. Surprisingly, for a pathogen like , which is readily transmitted fecal-orally, mice housed in the same cage can develop vastly different levels of infection, ranging from undetectable to lethal. The motivation for this study was to investigate this phenomenon and assess the association between the severity of cryptosporidiosis and the fecal microbiota. To this aim, the association between severity of cryptosporidiosis and caging (group caged vs. individually caged) and between the microbiota taxonomy and the course of the infection was examined. In contrast to mice caged in groups of four, a majority of mice caged individually did not excrete a detectable level of oocysts. Microbiota α diversity in samples collected between three days prior to infection and one day post-infection was negatively correlated with the severity of cryptosporidiosis, suggesting a causal negative relationship between microbiota diversity and susceptibility to .
隐孢子虫病是由隐孢子虫属（顶复门）的几种原生动物引起的肠道感染。免疫抑制小鼠常用于模拟这种感染。令人惊讶的是，对于像这样一种易于粪-口传播的病原体，同笼饲养的小鼠会出现感染程度差异极大的情况，从检测不到感染到致死性感染。本研究的目的是调查这一现象，并评估隐孢子虫病严重程度与粪便微生物群之间的关联。为此，研究了隐孢子虫病严重程度与饲养方式（群养与单笼饲养）之间的关联，以及微生物群分类与感染过程之间的关联。与四只一组群养的小鼠不同，大多数单笼饲养的小鼠未排出可检测水平的卵囊。在感染前三天至感染后一天采集的样本中，微生物群α多样性与隐孢子虫病的严重程度呈负相关，这表明微生物群多样性与对隐孢子虫的易感性之间存在因果负相关关系。
