The study of virulence of Legionella pneumophila and its interactions with its hosts has been predominantly conducted in cellulo in the past decades. Although easy to implement and allowing the dissection of molecular pathways underlying host-pathogen interactions, these cellular models fail to provide conditions of the complex environments encountered by the bacteria during the infection of multicellular organisms. To improve our understanding of human infection, several animal models have been developed. This review provides an overview of the invertebrate and vertebrate models that have been established to study L. pneumophila infection and that are alternatives to the classical mouse model, which does not recall human infection with L. pneumophila well. Finally we provide insight in the main contributions made by these models along with their pros and cons.

过去几十年来，对嗜肺军团菌的毒力及其与其宿主相互作用的研究主要是在纤维素中进行的。尽管易于实现并允许剖析宿主-病原体相互作用的分子途径，但这些细胞模型无法提供细菌在多细胞生物感染过程中遇到的复杂环境的条件。为了提高我们对人类感染的了解，开发了几种动物模型。本综述概述了为研究嗜肺军团菌感染而建立的无脊椎动物和脊椎动物模型，这些模型是经典小鼠模型的替代品，经典小鼠模型不能很好地回忆人类感染嗜肺军团菌的情况。最后，我们深入了解这些模型的主要贡献及其优缺点。