Figure 1.

Bartonella taylorii causes sustained chronic blood stream infection in SCID/Beige mice. A: A/J, SCID, and SCID/Beige mice were inoculated by intraperitoneal injection with approximately 1.5 × 10¹⁰ bacterial genome equivalents of B. taylorii. At indicated time points after infection, blood was collected and plated on bacterial media to determine colony forming units (CFU) as shown. B: SCID/Beige mice were infected with B. taylorii LL-WM9 at approximately 3 × 10⁹ (H, 4 mice) or 1 × 10⁹ (L, 2 mice) genome copies. Blood was collected at indicated times postinfection and analyzed by qPCR to determine B. taylorii gltA gene copy number. As expected, the gltA sequence was not amplifiable from uninfected control animals (2 mice, data not shown).