Suppression of adaptive immunity by Salmonella

Salmonella causes both diarrhoea and typhoid fever. There are more than 21 million cases of typhoid fever worldwide each year, with many people who are infected becoming chronic carriers. Resistance to Salmonella requires the development of an adaptive immune response in which specialised white blood cells display small fragments of bacteria to other immune cells, which then mount a defence response targeted at Salmonella to eliminate these bacteria. However, it is known that Salmonella can disable these defences and cause disease. We will use a variety of approaches to understand the mechanisms by which this happens.

Knowledge gained from these studies could be used to help in the design of next-generation vaccines.