Flow-Mediated Regulation of Pathogen Survival in the Human Stomach

Abstract

Foodborne diseases remain a major public-health burden, and the gastric acid barrier serves as the body's primary chemical defense against ingested microbes. Yet experimentally investigating pathogen survival within this environment is highly challenging. Although recent computational stomach models have provided insights into gastric disorders, none have coupled fluid flow, acid transport, and pathogen population kinetics in a realistic stomach to assess gastric acid barrier function. Here, we develop an imaging-based stomach model that tracks 10,000 massless particles representing pathogen colonies ingested with a liquid meal as they are advected through a dynamic, spatially heterogeneous pH field. The model incorporates acid secretion, peristaltic mixing, and gastric tone-driven emptying. Using this framework, we quantify how hypomotility and altered gastric tone influence pathogen survival. Motility emerges as the dominant factor governing pathogen fate. The hypomotile stomach exhibits weaker mixing, retaining nearly 50% of the initial pathogen population alive 6 minutes after ingestion, compared with less than 30% in healthy cases. It also produces broader acid-dose distributions and more heterogeneous survival outcomes. Counterintuitively, among healthy-motility cases, increased gastric tone delivers the highest concentration of viable pathogens into the duodenum, revealing a trade-off between transport and acid-mediated inactivation. These findings demonstrate that conventional metrics such as average pH or gastric emptying rate are insufficient for assessing gastric sterilization. Instead, the present flow-transport-kinetics framework provides new mechanistic insights into pathogen survival and gastric infection risk.