FIG. 5.

Statins inhibit bacterial infection at physiologically relevant concentrations. RAW 264.7 macrophages were treated with 50 nM lovastatin (gray bars) or the vehicle control (solid bars) for 3 days prior to infection with GFP-expressing S. enterica serovar Typhimurium for 20 h and then were examined by fluorescence microscopy. For each sample, 100 infected cells were counted, and the numbers of bacteria in individual cells were assigned to one of three categories: 1 to 5 bacteria, 6 to 15 bacteria, or 20 to 200 bacteria. The data are means ± standard errors of the means for three slides.