Abstract
Climate change, changing farming practices, rising levels of antibiotic resistance and social and demographic changes are likely to lead to future increases in community acquired opportunistic bacterial infections that are more difficult or impossible to treat. Uncovering the prevalence and identity of pathogenic bacteria in the environment is key to assessing environmental transmission risks. We describe the first use of the Wax moth larva Galleria mellonella, a well-established model for the mammalian innate immune system, to selectively enrich and characterise pathogens from environmental samples. Four highly virulent isolates isolated from coastal environments in the South West of the U.K. using this approach were whole-genome sequenced. A Proteus mirabilis strain was found to carry the Salmonella SGI1 genomic island, a combination which has emerged in the last ten years as a human and animal pathogen in hospitals and farms but has not been reported from the U.K. The recently described species Vibrio injenensis previously known only from human patients in Korea was isolated only for the third time. Pathogenic Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa strains were found to carry large numbers of virulence and antibiotic resistance genes. Our unbiased isolation method uncovered diverse virulent species, highlighting its power to detect potential emerging pathogens.
Footnotes
↵§ joint first authors