Standardized methods to rear high-quality Galleria mellonella larvae for the study of fungal pathogens

The greater wax moth, Galleria mellonella, has gathered widespread interest in the biomedical research community as an alternative non-mammalian model to study bacterial and fungal infections in humans. Nevertheless, most laboratories rely on commercial breeding companies that grow these larvae in bulk. Variation in rearing conditions between these companies and shipping of the larvae affects the response of G. mellonella to infection, both decreasing the reproducibility and comparison of infection experiments across labs. To unlock the full potential of G. mellonella as an infection model, standardized rearing is essential to produce healthy larvae of uniform quality. To this end, we developed an optimized protocol using a high nutritional artificial diet and cost-effective housing solutions to ensure optimal conditions during each stage of the G. mellonella life cycle. This resulted in the rapid generation of larvae with a short larval phase, large size and increased weight. A survival analysis comparing the standardized larvae with commercially obtained larvae showed significantly higher survival of standardized reared larvae after infection with Candida albicans proving the higher quality of standardized reared larvae.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.17026/dans-xqv-eztn
PID https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:nl:ui:13-lg-4b0v
Metadata Access https://easy.dans.knaw.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=oai:easy.dans.knaw.nl:easy-dataset:236071
Provenance
Creator Jong, A.W. de ORCID logo
Publisher DANS archive
Contributor Hagen, F; Hagen, F.; Jong, A.W. de; Dr. F. Hagen (Westerdijk Fungal Biodiversity Institute); Drs. A.W. de Jong (Westerdijk Fungal Biodiversity Institute)
Publication Year 2023
Rights info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess; License: http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0; http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0
OpenAccess true
Representation
Language English
Resource Type Dataset
Format SPSS data-files (sav); application/x-cmdi+xml
Discipline Life Sciences