Journal
NATURE REVIEWS MICROBIOLOGY
Volume 14, Issue 5, Pages 320-330Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/nrmicro.2016.34
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- Minerva Center for Stochastic Decision Making in Microorganisms
- European Research Council (ERC) [260871]
- Israel Science Foundation [492/15]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Antibiotic tolerance is associated with the failure of antibiotic treatment and the relapse of many bacterial infections. However, unlike resistance, which is commonly measured using the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) metric, tolerance is poorly characterized, owing to the lack of a similar quantitative indicator. This may lead to the misclassification of tolerant strains as resistant, or vice versa, and result in ineffective treatments. In this Opinion article, we describe recent studies of tolerance, resistance and persistence, outlining how a clear and distinct definition for each phenotype can be developed from these findings. We propose a framework for classifying the drug response of bacterial strains according to these definitions that is based on the measurement of the MIC together with a recently defined quantitative indicator of tolerance, the minimum duration for killing (MDK). Finally, we discuss genes that are associated with increased tolerance - the 'tolerome' - as targets for treating tolerant bacterial strains.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available