Sequential antibiotic exposure restores antibiotic susceptibility.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The prevalence of antibiotic resistance continues to rise, rendering many valuable antimicrobial drugs ineffective. Pairwise cyclic antibiotic therapy, where treatment is rapidly switched between two antibiotics, has been demonstrated in vitro to limit the evolution of antibiotic resistance. However, what happens when resistance inevitably evolves to one of the drugs?

Methods

In this study, we perform over 450 evolution experiments to test the resilience of four proposed cyclic therapies. We use soft agar gradient evolution and 'flat plates' to identify resistance trade-offs that are resilient to compensatory mitigation. Resensitizations were detected by antimicrobial susceptibility assays, and their mechanistic underpinnings were elucidated via genomic and phenot

SUBMITTER: Chowdhury FR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12630574 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature