Article
作者: Wang, Han ; Li, Pengpeng ; Ma, Hongfeng ; Fang, Lei ; Gan, Zhenji ; Su, Feng ; Gao, Xia ; Hang, Dong ; Qiu, Tiantian ; Wang, Ye ; Chen, Zexu ; Liao, Yang ; Qiu, Kehui ; Zhou, Na ; Wang, Fangyu ; Hong, Xin ; Zhou, Yuwei ; Zhang, Jian ; Chen, Caiping ; Feng, Fan ; Xuan, Ji ; Liu, Zhifeng ; Jiang, Zhihui ; Chen, Huaqun ; He, Weiqi ; Yang, Zhuoxin ; Zhang, Xuena ; Gong, Jianfeng ; Chen, Xin ; Zhang, Junhao ; Zhou, Hairong ; Zhu, Minsheng ; Shan, Xinqi ; Liu, Lutao
Ulcerative colitis (UC) is a severe inflammatory bowel disease affecting millions of people worldwide, but the factors driving the condition are poorly understood. In tissue samples from individuals with UC, we found that macrophages were depleted from areas of the colon that did not yet exhibit overt epithelial inflammation. We hypothesized that toxins produced by bacteria could impair macrophages and that this could promote wider inflammation. We isolated a variant of
Aeromonas
genus from stool samples from UC patients, which we termed macrophage-toxic bacteria (MTB), because aerolysin secreted by MTB caused macrophage death. MTB colonized mice under pathogenic conditions and triggered colitis. Antibodies against aerolysin alleviated colitis induced by
Aeromonas
in mice. In a cohort, UC patients more frequently tested positive for
Aeromonas
than healthy controls did.