Abstract
Objective: Metabolic sources for food play a very important role in developing a niche for a microbe to invade and cause infection in the host. The influence of various sugars on invasion of Streptococcus agalactiae or Group B streptococcus (GBS) into HeLa and A549 cells in vitro were evaluated.
 Methods: The cell lines and the bacteria were pretreated separately with different sugars before invasion. These observations were also corroborated with light microscopy.
 Results: Our results showed that the maximum GBS invasion observed at 2h, decreased significantly (p<0.05) when the cells were pretreated with N-acetyl galactosamine (GlcNAc), D-xylose, sucrose, lactose, D-mannose, and D-glucose. In contrast, mannitol was seen to support the invasion of GBS. In addition, when a combined effect of GlcNAc and xylose was studied, 87.5%–91% inhibition to GBS invasion was observed in HeLa and A549 cell lines, respectively. A sizeable reduction in invasion was observed when the bacteria were pretreated with 10 mM of D-Glucose (79.32%), GlcNAc (69.66%), and mannose (48.28%). In conclusion, GlcNAc, D-xylose, and D-glucose proved to be excellent inhibitors to GBS invasion. Furthermore, bacterial pretreatment results might indicate that these sugar specific receptors might be present on the epithelial cells which possibly gets blocked and thus inhibits the entry of GBS.
 Conclusion: These findings are the first to suggest the role of these sugars as a way to alternative therapies to GBS infection by altering the host-pathogen environment during invasion.
Highlights
Successful colonization of a host by bacterial microbe is a complex event usually involving a microbe-encoded ligand and a eukaryotic receptor [1]
The first line of defense against these infectious microbes consists of decoy oligosaccharides in the mucous layer of epithelial cells [1,2]
We studied the time course of Group B streptococcus (GBS) invasion on HeLa and A549 cells to determine the effect of incubation time on the number of bacteria internalized or invaded into the cells (Fig. 1a and b)
Summary
Successful colonization of a host by bacterial microbe is a complex event usually involving a microbe-encoded ligand and a eukaryotic receptor [1]. Once the microbe makes an entry into the host cell, the step is to dwell and depending on where in the host an invading bacterium takes up residence, the sources of food available within that niche will determine whether that microbe can successfully establish itself. It has been suggested that interference in this process, by carbohydrates or homologs could be an effective means of interrupting the course of infection and potentially its transmission [3,4,5,6]. This mechanism could be exploited as a means to prevent colonization and invasion
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