Antibiotic Tolerance and Persistence Studied Throughout Bacterial Growth Phases

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingBook chapterResearchpeer-review

  • Enea Maffei
  • Cinzia Fino
  • Alexander Harms

Antibiotic tolerance and persistence allow bacteria to survive lethal doses of antibiotic drugs in the absence of genetic resistance. Despite the urgent need to address these phenomena as a cause of clinical antibiotic treatment failure, studies on antibiotic tolerance and persistence are notorious for contradictory and inconsistent findings. Many of these problems are likely caused by differences in the methodology used to study antibiotic tolerance and persistence in the laboratory. Standardized experimental procedures would therefore greatly promote research in this field by facilitating the integrated analysis of results obtained by different research groups. Here, we present a robust and adaptable methodology to study antibiotic tolerance/persistence in broth cultures of Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The hallmark of this methodology is that the formation and disappearance of antibiotic-tolerant cells is recorded throughout all bacterial growth phases from lag after inoculation over exponential growth into early and then late stationary phase. In addition, all relevant experimental conditions are rigorously controlled to obtain highly reproducible results. We anticipate that this methodology will promote research on antibiotic tolerance and persistence by enabling a deeper view at the growth-dependent dynamics of this phenomenon and by contributing to the standardization or at least comparability of experimental procedures used in the field.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationBacterial Persistence : Methods and Protocols
EditorsNatalie Verstraeten, Jan Michiels
Number of pages18
PublisherHumana Press
Publication date2021
Edition2. ed.
Pages23-40
Chapter2
ISBN (Print)978-1-0716-1620-8, 978-1-0716-1623-9
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-0716-1621-5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021
SeriesMethods in Molecular Biology
Volume2357
ISSN1064-3745

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

    Research areas

  • Antibiotic tolerance, Bacterial persistence, Bacterial resilience, Escherichia coli, Growth media, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Reproducibility, Stationary phase

ID: 283023580