Applying ecological resistance and resilience to dissect bacterial antibiotic responses.

ABSTRACT: An essential property of microbial communities is the ability to survive a disturbance. Survival can be achieved through resistance, the ability to absorb effects of a disturbance without a notable change, or resilience, the ability to recover after being perturbed by a disturbance. These concepts have long been applied to the analysis of ecological systems, although their interpretations are often subject to debate. Here, we show that this framework readily lends itself to the dissection of the bacterial response to antibiotic treatment, where both terms can be unambiguously defined. The ability to tolerate the antibiotic treatment in the short term corresponds to resistance, which primarily depends on traits associated with individual cells. In contrast, the ability to recover after bein

SUBMITTER: Meredith HR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6281428 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature