[Comparative study of the behavior of capsular and noncapsular pneumococcus variants in the L929 cell culture]

The comparative study of the behavior of the capsular and noncapsular variants of pneumococci, serotype 27, in culture L929 revealed that under the conditions of the experiment both variants showed the same capacity for adhesion, but the capsular variant had a stronger cytopathic effect which was retained after subculturing the infective material in the cell culture. The possibility of isolating the noncapsular variant of pneumococci from culture L929 on a solid nutrient medium lasted only 9 hours, while the capsular variant could be isolated during the whole experiment. The noncapsular variant showed greater sensitivity to the action of penicillin and more pronounced capacity for L-transformation in vitro than the capsular one.