Abstract
A volunteer was given cranberry juice cocktail (CJC) or water to drink, and urine was collected at 2 and 8 hours after consumption, in order to quantitatively determine whether adhesion forces were changed for the volunteer after CJC consumption. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) was used to measure adhesion forces between bacteria and a silicon nitride tip. Forces between Escherichia coli or Staphylococcus aureus and the AFM tip were lower in the urine after the volunteer consumed CJC, compared to drinking water. A steric model was applied to the AFM data, in order to quantify how the urine changed the properties of the bacterial surfaces. There was a small decrease in the equilibrium length of surface molecules on the bacteria when in the post-CJC urine, compared to the post-water urine. However, these changes were not statistically significant. We hypothesize that post-CJC urine imparts subtle changes on the molecules of the bacterial surfaces, and that these changes lead to the reduction in adhesion with the AFM probe.
Highlights
Considered to be one of the most common bacterial infections, urinary tract infections will affect almost half of all women in their lifetime, and nearly 1 in 3 women will have a UTI requiring antibiotics before age 24 [1]
We focused on representative bacterial pathogens in this study, namely, two types of clinical E. coli that are associated with UTIs, and S. aureus ATCC43866
By considering changes in the post-cranberry juice cocktail (CJC) urine data as a function of time, our results demonstrated that the adhesion forces for the two E.coli strains after drinking CJC continued to decrease over the eight hour measurement period while the adhesion forces of S. aureus appeared to reach a plateau 2 hs post-CJC
Summary
Considered to be one of the most common bacterial infections, urinary tract infections will affect almost half of all women in their lifetime, and nearly 1 in 3 women will have a UTI requiring antibiotics before age 24 [1]. Alternative therapies for UTIs have drawn increasing interest due to concern of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Cranberry products are consumed by many healthy women as a preventive measure, but further research is needed to elucidate how oral consumption of cranberry affects the activity of uropathogenic bacteria, and to better understand the type of cases where cranberry can be effective for UTI prevention. Remaining UTIs are caused by various organisms, including staphylococci, proteus organisms, Klebsiella spp., and Enterococcus faecalis. Catheter-related UTIs tend to be caused by Gramnegative bacilli [10], including pseudomonads [11], fungi, and Gram-positive cocci, which includes staphylococci [10,12,13]
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