Differential pattern of infection and i immune response during experimental oral candidiasis in BALB/c and DBA/2 (H‐2^d) mice

Abstract

We used an experimental model of oral candidiasis in the mouse to investigate the impact of the introduction of Candida albicans into a Candida-free system. We report that 2 strains of mice with the same major histocompatibility complex haplotype (H-2d) display different kinetics of primary oral infection after topical application of the same inoculum. The mucosal reactions in both DBA/2 and BALB/c mice involve a similar recruitment of CD4+ and CD8+ T cells and of MAC-1+ cells in mucosal tissue during the infection. A carrier state is maintained following the resolution of the infection in both strains and is associated with the persistence of intraepithelial CD4+ T cells. However, there is a time-specific recruitment of gamma delta T cells that coincides with a dramatic decrease in viable Candida in the mucosal tissue; this occurs on day 3 in BALB/c mice and on day 6 in DBA/2 mice. The denouement of an oral contact with Candida is also different in the 2 mouse strains, cell-mediated immunity being triggered in DBA/2 mice but not in BALB/c mice. The different kinetics of Candida clearance in BALB/c vs DBA/2 mice may therefore signal a differential priming of T cell subsets whose modalities do not appear to be associated with the H-2 complex.

A Novel Murine Model of Oral Candidiasis with Local Symptoms Characteristic of Oral Thrush

“…As Samaranayake, Y.H. and L.P. (19) reviewed in 2001, a number of animal models have been described to study oral candidiasis using rabbits (21), rats (9, 18), mice (5,6) and their mutants (7). Compared with them, however, our model can be handled more simply and easily and is not expensive; it can therefore be more useful for screening of antifungals and to investigate the pathogenesis of C. albicans as an oral infection.…”

Isolates of Candida albicans that differ in virulence for mice elicit strain-specific antibody-mediated protective responses

“…Inbred mice differ in their susceptibility to systemic infection with the yeast [1e3], and some progress has been made in identifying the genetic basis of these differences [4e6]. In oral candidiasis, the increased tissue susceptibility of CBA/CaH mice relative to BALB/c has been confirmed [7], and DBA/2 mice show slightly different patterns of oral colonisation compared to BALB/c [8,9]. However, the extent to which host responses are related to global virulence properties of different Candida strains has not yet been evaluated.…”

Oral Candidiasis: Clinical Manifestations and Cellular Adaptive Host Responses

“…The contrast between the results of Elahi and Farah is of particular interest, as both groups were using the same isolate of the yeast (3630, from the Mycology Reference Laboratory at the Royal North Shore Hospital). After oral infection, DBAJ2 mice showed a bimodal pattern of colonization (Chakir et al, 1994), a feature reproduced by Elahi et al (2000), whereas in the experiments of Farah (Ashman et al, 2003), only a single peak was observed. It seemed probable that the course of oral infection in this mouse strain was influenced by the actual technique used for infection.…”

“…BALB/c and DBA/2 mice are of the same major histocompatibility complex (MHC) type, but BALB/c is C5-suflicient, whereas DBN2 is C5-def,rcient. Although DBN2 mice were somewhat more prone to infection than BALB/c mice (Chakir et al, 1994), oral infection in both strains resulted in an increase in MAC-I* cells and a comparable recruitment of CD4+ and CD8* T lymphocytes into the mucosal tissue. Thus, in contrast to systemic infection, complementderived chemotactic factors appear to have little or no effect on inflammatory processes in the oral mucosa.…”

“…In BALB/c and DBA/2 mice, oral infection with C. albicans resulted in an expansion of the /6 cell population (Chakir et al, 1994;Elahi et al, 2000), although the strains showed different kinetics, with the influx commencing on day 3 in the BALB/o mice, but on day 5 in the DBA/2 strain (Chakir et al,1994). In both strains, the increase in /6 cell numbers was associated with a substantial decrease in the number of viable organisms recovered from the mucosal tissue.…”