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Childhood Diseases Week Mice to Meningitis
12 February 2014

Mice to Meningitis

Humans are walking Petri dishes, carrying around bacteria that outnumber our own body cells ten to one. Many of these organisms are beneficial, but as with any large community, there are always a few bad apples. Neisseria meningitidis is one of them. The bacterium lurks harmlessly in the airways of most of us, until suddenly turning nasty and causing meningitis. What brings about this change is poorly understood, in part because it can’t be studied in other animals as they lack the specific proteins that fix the bacteria firmly in the airway. By breeding mice that possess this human protein – shown as thin black lines in this mouse's nasal passage – scientists successfully infected the animals with meningitis. This raises the possibility of using an animal model to investigate the disease that’s prevalent among adolescents and kills around ten percent of its victims.

Written by Jan Piotrowski

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BPoD stands for Biomedical Picture of the Day. Managed by the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences until Jul 2023, it is now run independently by a dedicated team of scientists and writers. The website aims to engage everyone, young and old, in the wonders of biology, and its influence on medicine. The ever-growing archive of more than 4000 research images documents over a decade of progress. Explore the collection and see what you discover. Images are kindly provided for inclusion on this website through the generosity of scientists across the globe.

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