Dietary sugar linked to bacterial epidemics

Posted on by WOCredentials

The increasing frequency and severity of healthcare-associated outbreaks caused by bacterium Clostridium difficile have been linked to the widely used food additive trehalose. A team of researchers discovered that in laboratory tests and animal models, trehalose enhances the virulence of epidemic C. difficile lineages that predominate in patient infections.

Read more here.

Collins, J., Robinson, C., Danhof, H. et al. Dietary trehalose enhances virulence of epidemic Clostridium difficile. Nature 553, 291–294 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature25178

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