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.