Fig. 8

Spores of epidemic ribotype adhere significantly different than those from the non-epidemic ribotype in vitro to Caco-2 and C2BBe1 Cells. C. difficile isolates (7 non-epidemic and 6 epidemic) were incubated with either Caco-2 or C2BBe1 cells for 3-h, washed, plated and counted to determine the adhesion for each isolate. The non-epidemic isolates are denoted by the black symbols and the epidemic isolates by the gray symbols. a The isolates were incubated with Caco-2 cells and the mean adhesion percentages were determined as the percentage of spores bound after washing as compared to the original inoculum dose. b The isolates were incubated with C2BBe1 cells and the mean adhesion percentages were determined as the percentage of the spores bound after washing as compared to the original inoculum dose. These data represent the average of three independent experiments and error bars indicate the standard errors of the means, and a statistically significant difference between each group at p < 0.05 (One-way ANOVA with Tukey’s post-hoc test; p < 0.05)