Oral Presentation BacPath 2024

Model urinary tract infections and multi-species bacterial invasion of human epithelial bladder cells  (#87)

Bill Söderström 1 , Alaska Pokhrel 1
  1. University of Technology Sydney, Sydney/Ultimo, NSW, Australia

Urinary tract infections (UTI) are one of the most prevalent infections in the world. With the increase in antibiotic resistance new thinking is required in the fight against this global problem. 

We suggest that a better understanding of bacterial behaviours during cellular invasion and the subsequent infection is needed to come up with alternative pathways towards novel therapeutics.

The first step towards this is understanding the overall infection cycle at a single cell level. By using high-resolution fluorescence microscopy, we followed bacteria during infections in in-vitro UTI models, and show invasion and striking morphology changes of UPEC, and other common UTI associated pathogens. Of particular interest is that we observed that multiple UTI bacteria regularly invade the same bladder cells and may in certain cases work in a synergistic manner to increase the virulence of infection.