[Investigation of pathogenic phenotypes and virulence determinants of food-borne Salmonella enterica strains in Caenorhabditis elegans animal model].

Salmonellosis, caused by non-typhoidal Salmonella enterica serovars with the consumption of contaminated food, is one of the leading food-borne disease that makes microbial food safety an important public health issue. This study was performed in order to determine the antibiotic resistance, serotyping, plasmid profiles and pathogenicity potentials of food-borne Salmonella isolates in Caenorhabditis elegans animal model system in Edirne province, located at Thrace region of Turkey. In this study, 32 Salmonella isolates, of which 26 belonged to Infantis, four to Enteritidis, one to Telaviv and one to Kentucky serovars, isolated from chicken carcasses were used. Antibiotic resistance profiles were determined by disc diffusion and broth microdilution methods. A new C.elegans nematode animal model system was used to determine the pathogenicity potential of the isolates. The antibiotic resistance profiles revealed that one (3.1%) isolate was resistant to gentamicin, two (6.2%) to ciprofloxacin, three (9.4%) to ampicillin, 18 (56.3%) to kanamycin, 19 (60.8%) to neomycin, 25 (78.1%) to tetracycline, 25 (78.1%) to trimethoprim, 26 (81.25%) to nalidixic acid, 27 (84.4%) to streptomycin and 32 (100%) to sulfonamide. All of the 32 strains were susceptible to chloramphenicol and ampicillin/sulbactam. High levels of resistance to streptomycin, nalidixic acid, tetracycline, trimethoprim, sulfonamide, kanamycin and neomycin was determined. According to the plasmid analysis, six isolates (18.75%) harboured 1-3 plasmids with sizes between 1.2 and 42.4 kb. In C.elegans nematode animal model system, the time (in days) required to kill 50% (TD50) of nematodes was calculated for each experimental group. TD50 values of the nematode group fed with S.Typhimurium ATCC 14028 that was used as the positive control and another group fed with E.coli OP50 as the negative control were 4.2 ± 0.5 days and 8.0 ± 0.02 days, respectively. TD50 of the groups fed with Salmonella isolates ranged between 3.4 and 7.3 days. The significance of the differences between TD50 values of the positive control and experimental groups was analysed by using Student's t test. Ten of the isolates (31.25%), of which six belonged to Infantis and four to the Enteritidis serotypes were non-pathogenic, and the rest 22 isolates including Infantis, Kentucky and Telaviv serovars (67.75%) were found to be pathogenic for the C.elegans animal system (p< 0.05). Twenty of the isolates (90.9%) which were determined as pathogens showed multiple drug resistance and three of them possessed 1-3 plasmids, sizes between 1.2 - 42.4 kb. The overall results underlined wide distribution of antibiotic-resistant Salmonella enterica strains and provided a practical alternative for studies aiming determination of pathogenic potential of environmental and food-borne strains through new experimental animal infection model. In this study, C.elegans was utilized for the first time to determine the profiles of pathogenicity of food-borne Salmonella serotypes in Turkey.