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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2009 Nov 20.
Published in final edited form as: Nat Med. 2009 Feb 1;15(2):211–214. doi: 10.1038/nm.1915

Figure 3. Plasmid loss, bacterial replication and cumulative bacterial burden in mouse lungs.

Figure 3

(a) Bacterial growth by CFU and the percentage of bacteria carrying plasmid in lungs after low-dose aerosol infection of C57BL/6 mice with H37Rv -pBP10. A subset of mice was treated with dexamethasone (dotted line) starting at week 10 for 8 d; lung CFU and the percentage of bacteria carrying plasmid are shown. Data at each time point are the means ± s.d. of five mice. Representative data from one of three experiments are shown, except for the immunosuppression, which reflects representative data from one of two experiments. (b) Mathematical modeling of cumulative bacterial burden (CBB). Using in vivo CFU, measured by nonselective plating, and the ratio of plasmid-bearing and plasmid-free cells, we calculated the CBB in the mouse lung. 95% confidence intervals (dotted lines) are shown for the bootstrap model of 1,000 synthetic datasets. (c) Depicts the same data as in b, but with a decimal y axis to highlight the cumulative bacterial killing during the first 3 weeks of infection. CFUs are the means ± s.d. of five mice. CBB is shown with the 95% confidence interval (gray).