Today, the genetic material of bacteria can be analyzed very quickly, and with it, their potential to cause disease. However, it is much more complex to determine just how virulent—that is, disease-causing—these pathogens actually are in a living organism. Until now, such studies have often been conducted on mice or other mammalian models and are time- and resource-intensive. For ethical reasons, these studies are also not suitable for high-throughput testing.
An interdisciplinary team at the Helmholtz Institute for One Health (HIOH) in Greifswald, a site of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI), has now demonstrated that the larva of the greater wax moth (Galleria mellonella) is a robust and ethically acceptable model for studying the human pathogenic bacterium Klebsiella pneumoniae on a larger scale. Klebsiella pneumoniae is one of the world’s most dangerous pathogens causing severe infections, particularly in clinical settings. By testing 80 different strains of this pathogen, the researchers demonstrated that, under standardized conditions, classic and particularly virulent variants can be clearly distinguished from one another in the wax moth larvae.
