Incidence of Clostridium Perfringens in the Livers of Conventional and Gnotobiotic Mice.

Clostridium perfringens type A has been found in 12% of livers examined from newly slaughtered bovine animals (Canada and Strong, J. Food Sci. 29:862, 1964). The organism has also been recovered from the livers of apparently healthy dogs (Wolbach and Saiki, J. Med. Res. 21:267, 1909; Berg et al., Proc. Soc. Exptl. Biol. Med. 24:433, 1926; Schweinburg and Sylvester, Proc. Soc. Exptl. Biol. Med. 82:527, 1953). Schatten (Surgery 36:256, 1954) presented evidence that, in dogs, C. perfringens may pass from the gastrointestinal tract to the liver via the portal vein. The incidence of C. perfringens in excised liver tissue and in feces from four types of mice was determined: conventional, conventional (C. perfringens, force-fed), gnotobiotic (C. perfringens monoflora), and germ-free. The strain of mice used was Ha/ICR (Schmidt). The 14 conventional mice were quartered in a laboratory animal room and fed (ad lib) a standard commercial diet. Fecal droppings on the fifth day from all animals were pooled and examined for C. perfringens in the following manner. A 1-g fecal sample was added to 99 ml of sterile 0.1% peptone water. Fractions of this dilution and further dilutions in 0.1% peptone water were plated in SPS agar (Angelotti et al., Appl. Microbiol. 10:193, 1962). Colonies appearing on the medium, which resembled C. perfringens, were transferred to identification media. A portion of liver from each mouse was also examined for C. perfringens. The second lot of conventional mice were maintained under conditions identical to those described above, except that, on the first day of arrival in the laboratory, each mouse was forcefed ca. 0.2 ml of an actively growing, C. perfringens thioglycolate culture. Each of three type A strains of the organism was fed to five mice. On