Development of real-time in vivo imaging of device-related Staphylococcus epidermidis infection in mice and influence of animal immune status on susceptibility to infection

Staphylococcus epidermidis is the leading cause of hospital-acquired device-related infections, but there is a lack of suit-ablemethods to investigate the pathogenesis of S. epidermidis infection. We created a bioluminescent strain of S. epidermi-dis and developed a subcutaneous catheter-relatedmurine in-fection model for real-time monitoring of biofilm-associated infection. Additionally, we compared severely immunocom-promised and immunocompetent mice, demonstrating the substantial effect of animal immune status on susceptibility to experimentally inducedS. epidermidisdisease. This studypre-sents a novel approach for investigating the in vivo details of the pathogenesis of S. epidermidis infection. Advanced modern detection techniques such as biolumines-cence imaging (BLI) use a highly sensitive optical biophotonic camera and subsequent digital quantification tomeasure in viv