‘Neisseria lactamica in biofilm’

Abstract

It is widely documented that N. meningitidis causes bacterial meningitis, which can also lead to sepsis, pneumonia and other life threatening infections (Rouphael and Stephens, 2012). According to the Meningitis Research Foundation in 2009-2010 there were 1469 cases of meningococcal meningitis and septicaemia in the UK alone. The commensal bacteria Neisseria lactamica shares 60 % genetic similarity with N. meningitidis (Bennett et al. 2010). N. lactamica carriage is high in early years of life but declines over time, with the inverse found in N. meningitidis carriage. It has been proposed that N. lactamica confers some protection against N. meningitidis. Previously over 350 volunteers have been inoculated with N. lactamica without any complications.

Biofilms offer individual bacteria a degree of protection compared to a planktonic state and also enhances the ability to evade the hosts’ immune system allowing long-term colonization (Yi and Tian, 2012). N. meningitidis has been shown to form colony units known as biofilms (Yi et al. 2004). We investigated whether N. lactamica is able to form a biofilm in vitro and establish a working model. The developed method was applied to N. meningitidis isolates collected from a previous carriage study (Deasy et al. 2015), and biofilm formation observed. Finally it was investigated what, if any, relationship N. lactamica has with N. meningitidis whilst in biofilm.

The results found that N. lactamica can form a stable biofilm in vitro. Most N. meningitidis carriage isolates were also found to form biofilm, although no relationship between biofilm phenotype, serotype or capsule production was found. In biofilm no correlation between biofilm phenotype or impact on growth over 7 days was observed.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Robert Read: orcid.org/0000-0002-4297-6728

ORCID for Jay Laver: orcid.org/0000-0003-3314-5989

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