MBIO, SOO CHAN LEE ET AL.A fungus contaminating yogurt containers led to a voluntary recall of certain Chobani products in September 2013. The mold made headlines again last week, when several news outlets reported on a July 8 mBio study in which researchers described a particularly virulent subspecies of Mucor circinelloides isolated from a container of yogurt that was part of the recall.
Joseph Heitman of Duke University in North Carolina and his colleagues analyzed the genome sequence and disease-causing potential of this subspecies of this mold, known as M. circinelloides f. circinelloides, which the researchers dubbed “Mucho” in their paper.
In the researchers’ animal model of infection, Mucho fed to mice did not trigger symptoms like diarrhea or weight loss. But when injected into the bloodstream, the mold caused significant weight loss in some animals. Testing the strain’s interaction with human immune cells, the researchers found that Mucho did not induce the production of inflammatory cytokines, although another subspecies, M. circinelloides f. lusitanicus, did. The failure to trigger chemokines “may contribute to the greater virulence of the M. circinelloides f. circinelloides subspecies,” the authors wrote.
“This is ...
