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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2014 Dec 4.
Published in final edited form as: Med Sci (Basel). 2013 Jul 26;1(1):2–19. doi: 10.3390/medsci1010002

Fig. 4. Alcohol effect on apical bacterial viability and binding.

Fig. 4

A) Polarized NHBEs were treated with 0 and 50 mM of basolateral alcohol for 24 hours and apically challenged with K. pneumoniae (MOI= ~10). The epithelia were lysed and bacterial supernatants were diluted and plated on agar plates for 24 hours. The colonies were counted to estimate the viable colonies. Alcohol presence promoted the number of colonies on airway epithelia. B) NHBEs were exposed to 0 and 50 mM of basolateral alcohol for 24 hours and then apically applied with 14C-labelled K. pneumoniae for an hour. The cells were washed and lysed to count radioactivity. Bound bacterial numbers were determined by comparing the cell-retaining radioactivity with a pre-established standard curve with various bacterial numbers. As demonstrated, alcohol did not alter the number of K. pneumoniae bound to NHBEs. Asterisk denotes statistically significant difference (p≤0.05, n=4–6).