Related papers: Does Antibiotic Resistance Evolve in Hospitals?
One of the most challenging problems in microbiology is to understand how a small fraction of microbes that resists killing by antibiotics can emerge in a population of genetically identical cells, the phenomenon known as persistence or…
Can we understand and predict the evolutionary pathways by which bacteria acquire multi-drug resistance (MDR)? These questions have substantial potential impact in basic biology and in applied approaches to address the global health…
Drug resistance remains a major problem for the treatment of HIV. Resistance can occur due to mutations that were present before treatment starts or due to mutations that occur during treatment. The relative importance of these two sources…
Antimicrobial resistance is a silent pandemic that is being exacerbated by the uncontrolled use of antibiotics. Since the discovery of penicillin, we have been largely dependent on microbe-derived small molecules to treat bacterial…
Non-genetic forms of antimicrobial drug resistance can result from cell-to-cell variability that is not encoded in the genetic material. Data from recent studies also suggest that non-genetic mechanisms can facilitate the development of…
The rapid emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is recognized as a global healthcare crisis, undermining the efficacy of life-saving antibiotics. This crisis is driven by the improper and overuse of antibiotics, which escalates…
Nosocomial pathogens such as Methicillin-Resistant {\em Staphylococcus aureus} (MRSA) and Vancomycin-resistant {\em Enterococci} (VRE) are the cause of significant morbidity and mortality among hospital patients. It is important to be able…
Antibiotics are the wonder discoveries to combat microbes. For decades, multiple varieties of antibiotics have been used for therapeutic purposes in hospital settings and communities throughout the world. Unfortunately, bacteria have become…
Bacterial populations often have complex spatial structures, which can impact their evolution. Here, we study how spatial structure affects the evolution of antibiotic resistance in a bacterial population. We consider a minimal model of…
Nosocomial infections place a substantial burden on health care systems and represent a major issue in current public health, requiring notable efforts for its prevention. Understanding the dynamics of infection transmission in a hospital…
The lack of rapid antibiotic susceptibility tests adversely affects the treatment of bacterial infections and contributes to increased prevalence of multidrug resistant bacteria. Here, we describe an all-electrical approach that allows for…
We show that a bacteria and bacteriophage system with either a perfectly nested or a one-to-one infection network is permanent, a.k.a uniformly persistent, provided that bacteria that are superior competitors for nutrient devote the least…
Whether evolution can be predicted is a key question in evolutionary biology. Here we set out to better understand the repeatability of evolution. We explored experimentally the effect of mutation supply and the strength of selective…
Ordinary differential equation (ODE) models used in mathematical epidemiology assume explicitly or implicitly large populations. For the study of infections in a hospital this is an extremely restrictive assumption as typically a hospital…
Antibiotic resistance is a major threat to global health. It emerges in multispecies microbial communities under antibiotic exposure. This makes antibiotic spectrum -- a drug's distribution of effects across species -- a potential key…
Drug gradients are believed to play an important role in the evolution of bacteria resistant to antibiotics and tumors resistant to anti-cancer drugs. We use a statistical physics model to study the evolution of a population of malignant…
We introduce and discuss a kinetic framework describing the time evolution of the statistical distributions of a population divided into the compartments of susceptible, infectious, recovered, and resistant in the presence of a microbial…
By challenging E. coli with sublethal norfloxacin for 10 days, Henry Lee and James Collins suggests the bacterial altruism leads to the population-wide resistance. By detailedly analyzing experiment data, we suggest that bacterial…
New combinations of existing antibiotics are being investigated to combat bacterial resilience. This requires detection technologies with reasonable cost, accuracy, resolution, and throughput. Here, we present a multi -drug screening…
Diseases caused by bacteria have been a threat to human civilisation for centuries. Despite the availability of numerous antibacterial drugs today, bacterial diseases continue to pose life-threatening challenges. The credit for this goes to…