Figure 2.

Bacterial and phage load recovered from G. mellonella larvae at the end of the 72nd hour. Four larvae in each of the eight treatment groups were treated with 10⁵CFU/larva of clinical isolate CD105LC2 culture and/or 10⁶ PFU/larva of phage cocktail (in 10 µL volumes) at time points shown in Table 1. Colonisation was ascertained by recovering (A) C. difficile from the guts of insects on CCEY selective plates and (B) phages using double BHI agar method. The lowest amount of bacteria was recovered from the prophylactic treatment (compared to the bacterial control), indicative of successful phage infection (p < 0.0001). The co-infection (with phage and bacteria) treatment also yielded a reduced bacterial load (p < 0.0001). The experiment was repeated three times and data were analysed using the Shapiro–Wilk normality test and Mann–Whitney–Wilcoxon test. n.s. = no significant difference, **** = significance at p < 0.0001.