Researchers from the Institute of Food Research in Britain have found that the food poisoning bug salmonella uses glucose to sustain itself while infecting a host's body. This breakthrough could act as a trigger in finding vaccine strains to protect from this and other disease-causing bacteria.
Around 20 million people globally suffer from salmonella infections every year with around 200,000 falling a victim to them. This has become a huge problem in the US where there have been many salmonella outbreaks over the last two years mainly from infected fruits and vegetables.
Bacterial nutrients is an emerging science and the British team decided to look at those nutrients which help sustain salmonella. They focused on the process of glycosis and found that mutant salmonella strains starved of glucose lost their ability to replicate and infect the host.
"Our experiments showed that glucose is the major sugar used by Salmonella during infection," said Arthur Thompson from the Institute of Food Research in Britain. Gary Rowley at the University of East Anglia also collaborated during the study.