Dietary sugar linked to bacterial epidemics

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.

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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