Abstract
Drosophila melanogaster flies represent an interesting model to study host–pathogen interactions as: (1) they are cheap and easy to raise rapidly and do not bring up ethical issues, (2) available genetic tools are highly sophisticated, for instance allowing tissue-specific alteration of gene expression, e.g., of immune genes, (3) they have a relatively complex organization, with distinct digestive tract and body cavity in which local or systemic infections, respectively, take place, (4) a medium throughput can be achieved in genetic screens, for instance looking for Pseudomonas aeruginosa mutants with altered virulence. We present here the techniques used to investigate host–pathogen relationships, namely the two major models of infections as well as the relevant parameters used to monitor the infection (survival, bacterial titer, induction of host immune response).
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Acknowledgements
We thank Marie-Céline Lafarge for expert technical help, Pr. Jean-Luc Imler for the sequences of the viral PCR primers and Dr. Sebastian Niehus for critical reading of the manuscript. Work in the group is funded by CNRS, Agence Nationale de la Recherche, a National Institute of Health PO1 AI085581 grant (coordinator: Pr. F. Ausubel), and Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale (Equipe FRM).
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Haller, S., Limmer, S., Ferrandon, D. (2014). Assessing Pseudomonas Virulence with a Nonmammalian Host: Drosophila melanogaster . In: Filloux, A., Ramos, JL. (eds) Pseudomonas Methods and Protocols. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1149. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0473-0_56
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0473-0_56
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