B. cenocepacia causes nonlethal pulmonary disease
and can be recovered for up to 7 days, thus providing a tractable
model to assess the relative efficacy of anti-infective treatments.
We also chose to use B. cenocepacia strain AU0728, which was
recovered from respiratory culture of a patient with cystic fibrosis,
and is a representative of the B. cenocepacia Midwest clone,
a lineage that accounts for a great deal of infection among patients
with cystic fibrosis in the United States [32]. Furthermore,
our previous work with AU0728 indicates that it is multidrugresistant
and capable of robust biofilm formation in vitro (unpublished
data) and thus ought to provide for a rigorous test
of novel anti-infective therapies.