• Mengmeng Li, Congya Li, Xianan Wu, Tangtian Chen, Lei Ren, Banglao Xu, and Ju Cao.
• Department of Laboratory Medicine, the First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University, No.1 Friendship Road, Yuzhong District, Chongqing, 400016, China.
• Crit Care. 2020 May 27; 24 (1): 268.

BackgroundThe intestinal microbiota plays a crucial role in human health, which could affect host immunity and the susceptibility to infectious diseases. However, the role of intestinal microbiota in the immunopathology of invasive candidiasis remains unknown.MethodsIn this work, an antibiotic cocktail was used to eliminate the intestinal microbiota of conventional-housed (CNV) C57/BL6 mice, and then both antibiotic-treated (ABX) mice and CNV mice were intravenously infected with Candida albicans to investigate their differential responses to infection. Furthermore, fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) was applied to ABX mice in order to assess its effects on host immunity against invasive candidiasis after restoring the intestinal microbiota, and 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequencing was conducted on fecal samples from both uninfected ABX and CNV group of mice to analyze their microbiomes.ResultsWe found that ABX mice displayed significantly increased weight loss, mortality, and organ damage during invasive candidiasis when compared with CNV mice, which could be alleviated by FMT. In addition, the level of IL-17A in ABX mice was significantly lower than that in the CNV group during invasive candidiasis. Treatment with recombinant IL-17A could improve the survival of ABX mice during invasive candidiasis. Besides, the microbial diversity of ABX mice was significantly reduced, and the intestinal microbiota structure of ABX mice was significantly deviated from the CNV mice.ConclusionsOur data revealed that intestinal microbiota plays a protective role in invasive candidiasis by enhancing IL-17A production in our model system.

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