Fig. 6

Invasion and persistence assays of different strains of S. enterica. Human intestinal epithelial cells (Caco-2) were infected with recipient SE819, transconjugant and wild type SE163A of S. enterica at MOI of 10. Bacterial invasion (a) and persistence assays (b) were performed 1 h and 48 h post infection, respectively. A slightly higher uptake and increased persistence was observed when Caco-2 cells were infected with the transconjugant strain as compared to the recipient SE819 strain. The error bars show the standard error of means for three biological replicates of three independent experiments. Student’s t-test was performed to determine the statistically significant difference between two groups of sample. A p value ≤0.05 was considered a significant difference between the two groups compared, as indicated by the asterisks (wild type vs. recipient and transconjugant vs. recipient). Statistically non-significant differences are indicated by “ns”