Classic reaction kinetics can explain complex patterns of antibiotic action.

ABSTRACT: Finding optimal dosing strategies for treating bacterial infections is extremely difficult, and improving therapy requires costly and time-intensive experiments. To date, an incomplete mechanistic understanding of drug effects has limited our ability to make accurate quantitative predictions of drug-mediated bacterial killing and impeded the rational design of antibiotic treatment strategies. Three poorly understood phenomena complicate predictions of antibiotic activity: post-antibiotic growth suppression, density-dependent antibiotic effects, and persister cell formation. We show that chemical binding kinetics alone are sufficient to explain these three phenomena, using single-cell data and time-kill curves of Escherichia coli and Vibrio cholerae exposed to a variety of antibiotics in co

SUBMITTER: Abel Zur Wiesch P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4554720 | biostudies-literature | 2015 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature