Our research article Identifying virulence determinants of multidrug-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae in Galleria mellonella in the FEMS Journal Pathogens and Disease was unanimously picked by the Pathogens and Disease Editors-in-Chiefs as the best article for 2021!

Our paper focuses on the bacterium Klebsiella pneumoniae and the genes required for its pathogenesis. K. pneumoniae is a major public health threat and is difficult to understand for a few reasons. One is that it is extremely diverse, so what underpins infection is not necessarily the same from strain to strain. nother reason is that K. pneumoniae strains that are not hypervirulent (which is the majority) generally do not cause disease in mice, so we are quite limited in terms of the models that can be used to study them.

In our study, we used high-throughput genomic fitness screening in an alternative in vivo model for infection – the caterpillar Galleria mellonella – to identify infection-related genes in a hypervirulent and a non-hypervirulent strain of K. pneumoniae. We found that certain known virulence factors have a dominant role in infection in both strains, but that, in addition, there are many putative virulence genes that contribute to infection only in the non-hypervirulent strain. These have been overlooked up to now because of a lack of suitable models for investigating non-hypervirulent K. pneumoniae.

Read more here.