A mouse model of typhoid fever could help scientists to develop vaccines against a disease that infects some 20 million people and kills more than 220,000 worldwide each year.
Mice are normally immune to the bacterium Salmonella typhi, which causes typhoid fever in humans. However, a team led by Sankar Ghosh at Columbia University in New York has shown that mice that lack an immune-system receptor called TLR11 — which recognizes a bacterial protein called flagellin — become susceptible to S. typhi and develop a deadly systemic infection akin to typhoid.
When mice that lack TLR11 were vaccinated with killed S. typhi or with serum from previously infected mice, they proved resistant to subsequent typhoid infection.
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Typhoid fever in a mouse. Nature 491, 162 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/491162d
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/491162d
