Mice and diets
Male and female C57BL/6N mice from Charles River Laboratories (Boston,
MA, USA) and C3H/HeJ mice from The Jackson Laboratory (Bar Harbor, ME,
USA) were obtained at three to four weeks of age and allowed to
acclimatize for a week before initiating diets. Mice were housed in
groups of five per cage and maintained at ambient temperature withad libitum supply of food and water. All animal handling
protocols were approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use
Committee (Protocol #20-060) at Virginia Tech.
All diets used for the study were obtained from Research Diets (New
Brunswick, NJ, USA). Males and females of both strains were randomly
divided and half of them were given a low-fat diet with 10% kcal fat
(LFD; D12450K), while the other half were given a high-fat diet with
60% kcal fat (HFD; D12492). Throughout the manuscript, we will refer to
the groups as follows: lean (low fat diet) or obese (high fat diet). The
mice were kept on these diets for 17-18 weeks before infections, and the
same diets were continued until the end of the experiment.