Quantifying the effects of antibiotic resistance and within-host competition on strain fitness in Streptococcus pneumoniae.

ABSTRACT: Competition plays a key role in shaping the structure and diversity of bacterial populations. In many clinically important bacterial species, strains compete at multiple scales: at the between-host scale for new hosts to colonise, and at the within-host scale during co-colonisation. Characterising these multiple facets of competition plays an important role in understanding bacterial ecology. This is particularly relevant for antibiotic resistance, where competition between antibiotic-susceptible and resistant strains determines resistance dynamics. In this work, we perform survival analyses on a large longitudinal dataset of Streptococcus pneumoniae carriage to quantify how within-host competition affects the rates of clearance and establishment of pneumococcal strains. We find that the p

SUBMITTER: Krishna A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12324126 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature