Developing Galleria mellonella as a model host for human pathogens

The larvae of Galleria mellonella (also known colloquially as the wax worm) is increasingly being used as an infection model to study virulence factors and pathogenesis of many prominent bacterial and fungal human pathogens. When compared with traditional mammalian model hosts, invertebrate infection models are cheaper to establish and maintain, are more amenable to high-throughput studies and are not subjected to the same ethical constraints as vertebrates. In addition to these benefits, G. mellonella larvae possess a number of other characteristics which make these organisms particularly useful for the study of human pathogens. Larvae are relatively large in size (12- 20 mm) which enables easy manipulation and facilitates the collection of tissue/ hemolymph samples for downstream analysis.