The application of modern and traditional research approaches to investigate salmonella susceptibility

Contamination of poultry products with Salmonella enterica is an important problem in poultry meat producing chains. An effective way to reduce food poisoning due to salmonella would be to breed chickens with improved resistance to salmonella. Unfortunately, host responses to salmonella are complex with many different factors involved. To learn more about the susceptibility of chicken to salmonella we applied new and traditional research techniques, including microarray-, pathway-, and cellular influx analyses. Two chicken lines that differ in salmonella susceptible were used under control and salmonella infected conditions. A DNA microarray analysis was performed to compare gene expression profiles in the intestine of the two lines. Typically, microarray experiments produce long lists of differentially expressed genes. In order to better understand the biology behind these data, it is relevant to include the available biological information of the genes under study. With the pathways and biological network information that came from these integrated approaches, the intestines of the different chicken lines were re-investigated with traditional immunological techniques, in order to verify the findings. With this combination of techniques we were able to find differences between the chicken lines that lead to difference in host responses and possibly to differences in susceptibility to salmonella. These results may be of relevance for breeding and feed industry. These results are obtained through the EC-funded FP6 Project ‘SABRE’ and ‘EADGENE’.