Now, research by a team led by University of Pennsylvania scientists has shown, using genomic techniques, that slight variations in the coding sequence of proteins that bind Salmonella to host cells can determine what type of animal a particular strain infects.
The work appears in Nature Communications.
“In Salmonella, we knew that many serovars are specific to one host; we didn’t know why, but we knew that they are,” said Dieter Schifferli, senior author on the paper and a professor of microbiology in Penn’s School of Veterinary Medicine. “In this work, we found strong associations between different serovars’ adhesin molecules and their preferred hosts, relationships that we then confirmed with work in the lab.”
FoodWorld 