Exploration of the bacterial invasion capacity of Listeria monocytogenes in ZF4 cells

Abstract

Despite the results from zebrafish challenged model have demonstrated that Listeria monocytogenes (Lm) has strong adjuvant effects when this attenuated pathogenic bacteria is viewed as aquaculture vaccine vector, the underlying mechanism is not clear and extensive investigations are required. To further explore the potential of Lm in the field of aquaculture vaccine, zebrafish embryonic fibroblast cell line (ZF4) was used to evaluate the invasion ability of Lm. The data from cellular level showed that Lm had the lower invasion tendentiousness in ZF4 cells while bacterial invasion capacity was compared between zebrafish embryos cell line and human intestinal epithelial cell line. In ZF4 cells, there is no significant difference in bacterial invasion capacity between wild strain EGD-e and double-deleted strain ΔactA/inlB, which suggested that this attenuated effect was not showed in zebrafish cells. In addition, translation analysis indicated that the expressions of CD4 and CD8a in ZF4 cells increased after 2-h infection of the two Lm strains. These results further demonstrated that Lm presented multiple advantages including lower pathogenicity and antigen presentation when attenuated stain was viewed as aquaculture vaccine vector.