Human-specific staphylococcal virulence factors enhance pathogenicity in a humanised zebrafish C5a receptor model.
Description
Provided are the raw data for "Humanisation of the zebrafish C5a receptor confers targeting by human-specific staphylococcal virulence factors", available at https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.18.955021v2 This mostly includes raw imaging data that we used to make the figures, in addition to some Prism files we used for data processing. Below is a copy of the abstract for this work. Staphylococcus aureus infects approximately 30% of the human population and causes a spectrum of pathologies ranging from mild skin infections to life-threatening invasive diseases. The strict host specificity of its virulence factors has severely limited the accuracy of in vivo models for the development of vaccines and therapeutics. To resolve this, we generated a humanised zebrafish model and determined that neutrophil-specific expression of the human C5a receptor conferred susceptibility to the S. aureus toxins PVL and HlgCB, leading to reduced neutrophil numbers at the site of infection and increased infection-associated mortality as a direct result of the interaction between S. aureus and the receptor. These results show that humanised zebrafish provide a valuable platform to study the contribution of human-specific S. aureus virulence factors to infection in vivo that could facilitate the development of novel therapeutic approaches and essential vaccines.