Antibiotic pretreatment with ampicillin or streptomycin differentially shapes Salmonella infection kinetics and associated intestinal inflammation in mice
Luca Maurer, Ursina Enz, Ersin Gül, Patrick Kiefer, Philipp Christen, Lea Fuchs, Wolf-Dietrich Hardt · 2026
Read Antibiotic pretreatment with ampicillin or streptomycin differentially shapes Salmonella infection kinetics and associated intestinal inflammation in mice by Luca Maurer, Ursina Enz, Ersin Gül, Patrick Kiefer, Philipp Christen, Lea Fuchs, Wolf-Dietrich Hardt (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13556942.txt.
Description
Luca Maurer and co-authors show that the drug used to prep mice for a gut infection study quietly changes the result, in a 2026 paper. To let Salmonella take hold, labs first clear the gut's normal germs with an antibiotic. Two drugs are in common use for this, streptomycin and ampicillin, and the team compared infections after each.
Both drugs let the germ settle in the gut just as well. But mice prepped with ampicillin got gut inflammation sooner, stronger, and for longer, with worse tissue harm. In germ-free mice the gap was gone, and moving gut germs between mice moved the effect too. The warning is plain: the prep drug is not a neutral stagehand, and results from the two standard models should not be compared with care.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Luca Maurer, Ursina Enz, Ersin Gül, Patrick Kiefer, Philipp Christen, Lea Fuchs, Wolf-Dietrich Hardt |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 70 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |