Assay of Heat Stable Enterotoxin Producing E. coli

내열성장독소 생산 대장균의 판정

Enterotoxigenic E. coli is one of causative agents of the infantile diarrhea and traveler's diarrhea. A modified infant mouse assay(IMA) was developed for the detection of heat stable enterotoxin (ST) of E. coli isolated from diarrheal and control infants and assay system was established with using enterotoxin producing reference strains. The supernatant of the 24 hour-shaking culture of E. coli in Casamino Acid Yeast Extract Salt Broth(CYES-2) was ingested orally into the 2-4 day old ICR mice. After the mice were kept at $25^{\circ}C$ for 4 hours, they were sacrificed and the gut weight body weight ratio(GW/BW) was taken as the index of fluid accumulation induced by heat stable enterotoxin of E. coli. The results obtained were as follows; 1. The GW/BW responses of IMA tested with enterotoxin reference strains of E. coli(E. coli O148H28:$ST^+LT^+$, E. coli $O78H^-:ST^+LT^+$, E. coli O15H11:$ST^-LT^+$, E. coli O1H7:$ST^-LT^-$) appeared ta be ST dose-dependent, and not LT-dependent. From the dose-response curve, $25{\mu}l$ of culture supernatant was determined as test amount of the IMA. 2. Frequency distribution of IMA result from 643 strain of E. coli showed normal distribution at low GW/BW ratio and dispersed pattern at high GW/BW ratio. The GW/BW ratios of $0.056{\pm}0.004(mean{\pm}SD)$ of normal distribution which distributed from 0.044 to 0.068(P<0.01) was considered as ST negative. Thus the GW/BW ratio above 0.069 could be regarded as ST positive.