Fig 8. The overexpression of the dominant negative mutants of mDia1 inhibits internalization of C. burnetii.

(A) HeLa cells were transfected with pEGFP (panels a-e), pEGFP-mDia1 WT (panels f-j), pEGFP-mDia1-N1 (dominant negative form) (panels k-o) or pEGFP-mDia1-ΔN3 (constitutively active form) (panels p-t). Transfected cells were infected for 4 h at 37°C with C. burnetii. Cells were fixed and processed for immunofluorescence to determine C. burnetii internalization as described in Materials and Methods. Cells were analyzed by confocal microscopy. Representative micrographs of cells are presented. As indicated in Fig 1, extracellular and total bacteria were stained in white pseudo color (panels c, h, m, and r) and red pseudo color (panels b, g, l, and q), respectively. In the merged images (panels d, i, n, and s) and the insets of merged images (panels e, j, o, and t), extracellular C. burnetii is shown in white and red pseudo colors (arrows), while intracellular C. burnetii is shown in red pseudo color (yellow arrowheads). Scale bar: 5 μm. (B) Quantification of C. burnetii internalized by transfected HeLa cells. (C) Quantification of total C. burnetii associated to HeLa cells. Between 40 and 60 cells and between 400 and 600 bacteria were counted in each experiment. Results are expressed as means ± SE of three independent experiments. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01 compared to the EGFP control (one-way ANOVA and Dunnett's post hoc test). ns: non-significant differences between groups (p > 0.05).