Figure 4
Metabolic burden of pQS and ironQS system in vitro and in vivo . (A) Growth curves of E. tarda loaded with pQS or ironQS plasmids cultivated in iron-rich medium, blank plasmid pUTat used as control. (B) Viable bacterial counts in each fish injected with these three strains (5 × 104 CFU per tail) at 12, 24 and 48 h. Ten fish were set as a pool and three parallels were taken. At time points, 10 fish of each group were randomly picked, homogenized and the bacterial numbers were counted.