CEPIA brings infrastructures and expertise to collaborators for their research projects. One of the applications is to infect plated hepatic cells with Plasmodium falciparum sporozoites. The procedure to get these sporozoites is the dissect infected mosquitoes, isolate their salivary glands in PBS with penicillin and streptomycin, crush them to liberate the motile sporozoites, count the parasites to determine a specific volume for the inoculum per well. 2 major colonies: Anopheles stephensi and coluzzii, are maintained and depending on which one is used to get sporozoites, bacterial contaminations appear more or less quickly in cell cultures which are incompatible with the in vitro experiments.
Bacteria present in contaminated culture medium has been identified using Maldi-tof and only Elizabethkingia anophelis seems to be present. Other bacteria are probably killed by the large spectrum antibiotics used except E. anophelis which is multiresistant to many of them (Comba IY et al, 2022).
In order to decrease the amount of E. anophelis, especially in An. stephensi, avoiding the use of antibiotics, another strategy would need to determine if our E. anophelis strain is constant in time and lozalisations or if different clones are present.
