Designing antibiotic cycling strategies by determining and understanding local adaptive landscapes.

ABSTRACT: The evolution of antibiotic resistance among bacteria threatens our continued ability to treat infectious diseases. The need for sustainable strategies to cure bacterial infections has never been greater. So far, all attempts to restore susceptibility after resistance has arisen have been unsuccessful, including restrictions on prescribing [1] and antibiotic cycling [2], [3]. Part of the problem may be that those efforts have implemented different classes of unrelated antibiotics, and relied on removal of resistance by random loss of resistance genes from bacterial populations (drift). Here, we show that alternating structurally similar antibiotics can restore susceptibility to antibiotics after resistance has evolved. We found that the resistance phenotypes conferred by variant alleles of

SUBMITTER: Goulart CP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3572165 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature