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Cholera toxin (CTX) facilitates the devastating clinical manifestations of Vibrio cholerae infection and promotes the massive secretory diarrhea that causes considerable spread of the pathogen. However, are there any other advantages to producing CTX for the V. cholerae organism? To address this question, investigators undertook a series of experiments in animal models, studying both wild-type V. cholerae (WTVC) and a CTX-knockout strain that cannot express either the A or B CTX subunits (ΔCTXABVC).
In initial experiments, they found that inoculation with WTVC led to a concentration of bacteria in the gut lumen that was 22-fold higher than the effect of inoculation with ΔCTXABVC, even though the concentration of both organisms was comparable…