Basic, Marijana and Bolsega, Silvia and Smoczek, Anna and Glaesner, Joachim and Hiergeist, Andreas and Eberl, Claudia and Stecher, Baerbel and Gessner, Andre and Bleich, Andre (2021) Monitoring and contamination incidence of gnotobiotic experiments performed in microisolator cages. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MEDICAL MICROBIOLOGY, 311 (3): 151482. ISSN 1438-4221, 1618-0607
Full text not available from this repository. (Request a copy)Abstract
With the increased interest in the microbiome research, gnotobiotic animals and techniques emerged again as valuable tools to investigate functional effects of host-microbe and microbe-microbe interactions. The increased demand for gnotobiotic experiments has resulted in the greater need for housing systems for short-term maintenance of gnotobiotic animals. During the last six years, the gnotobiotic facility of the Hannover Medical School has worked intensively with different housing systems for gnotobiotic animals. Here, we report our experience in handling, contamination incidence, and monitoring strategies that we apply for controlling gnotobiotic experiments. From our experience, the risk of introducing contaminants to animals housed in microisolator cages is higher than in isolators. However, with strict operating protocols, the contamination rate in these systems can be minimized. In addition to spore-forming bacteria and fungi from the environment, spore-forming bacteria from defined bacterial communities used in experiments represent the major risk for contamination of gnotobiotic experiments performed in microisolator cages. The presence/absence of contaminants in germ-free animals can be easily monitored by preparation of wet mounts and Gram staining of fecal samples. Contaminants in animals colonized with specific microorganisms need to be tracked with methods such as next-generation sequencing. However, when using PCR-based methods it is important to consider that relatively small amounts of bacterial DNA detected likely originates from food, bedding, or reagents and is not to be interpreted as true contamination.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | ALTERED SCHAEDLER FLORA; GERM-FREE MICE; BACTERIAL-CONTAMINATION; MOUSE-MICROBIOTA; COLONIZATION; RESISTANCE; STABILITY; BARRIER; Germ-free; Defined microbiota animal models; Microbiological monitoring; 16S rRNA gene sequencing; Microisolator cages; Gnotobiotic experiments |
| Subjects: | 600 Technology > 610 Medical sciences Medicine |
| Divisions: | Medicine > Lehrstuhl für Medizinische Mikrobiologie und Hygiene |
| Depositing User: | Dr. Gernot Deinzer |
| Date Deposited: | 16 Sep 2022 06:19 |
| Last Modified: | 16 Sep 2022 06:19 |
| URI: | https://pred.uni-regensburg.de/id/eprint/47484 |
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