Antibiotic resilience: a necessary concept to complement antibiotic resistance?

ABSTRACT: Resilience is the capacity of systems to recover their initial state or functions after a disturbance. The concepts of resilience and resistance are complementary in ecology and both represent different aspects of the stability of ecosystems. However, antibiotic resilience is not used in clinical bacteriology whereas antibiotic resistance is a recognized major problem. To join the fields of ecology and clinical bacteriology, we first review the resilience concept from ecology, socio-ecological systems and microbiology where it is widely developed. We then review resilience-related concepts in microbiology, including bacterial tolerance and persistence, phenotypic heterogeneity and collective tolerance and resistance. We discuss how antibiotic resilience could be defined and argue that the

SUBMITTER: Carvalho G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6939251 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature