ArticleBMC evolutionary biology2013
Evolution of Escherichia coli rifampicin resistance in an antibiotic-free environment during thermal stress.
Article in BMC evolutionary biology, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 81 papers.
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81 citing papers in PubMed, 170 citations in OpenAlex.
- Climate change and antimicrobial resistance.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2026Review
- Environment-dependent epistasis shapes adaptation to fluctuating resources.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Ambient temperature variations and antimicrobial resistance: a multicountry analysis of non-linear relationships and temperature thresholds.BMJ global health · 2026Article
- Antibiotic susceptibility ofmSphere · 2026Article
- Cryptic phenotypic variation emerges rapidly during the adaptive evolution of a carbapenemase.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Unraveling Epistatic Interactions Between Sites Under Drug-Dependent Selection in the Mycobacterium tuberculosis Genome.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Climate change and antimicrobial resistance: a global-scale analysis.BMC infectious diseases · 2025Article
- Evolution and evolvability of rifampicin resistance across the bacterial tree of life.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Climate warming fuels the global antibiotic resistome by altering soil bacterial traits.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Chronic Heat Stress Can Induce Conjugation of a NovelAntibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Warming is Associated With More Encoded Antimicrobial Resistance Genes and Transcriptions Within Five Drug Classes in Soil Bacteria: A Case Study and Synthesis.Environmental microbiology · 2025Article
- Article
- What Is the Impact of Antibiotic Resistance Determinants on the Bacterial Death Rate?Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- An eco-evolutionary perspective on antimicrobial resistance in the context of One Health.iScience · 2025Review
- Effect of temperature on the activity of efflux pumps in selected species of human opportunistic bacterial pathogens.Memorias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz · 2025Article
- Advances in drug resistance and resistance mechanisms of four colorectal cancer-associated gut microbiota.PeerJ · 2025Review
- Efficient degradation of neomycin byFrontiers in microbiology · 2025Article
- An integrated framework for antimicrobial resistance: links with climate change and vulnerability.Frontiers in public health · 2025Review
- Nonlinear impacts of temperature on antibiotic resistance inEnvironmental science and ecotechnology · 2024Article
- Warmer is better for evolutionary rescue, driving a warm-to-cold bias in habitat colonization dynamics.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
21 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundBeneficial mutations play an essential role in bacterial adaptation, yet little is known about their fitness effects across genetic backgrounds and environments. One prominent example of bacterial adaptation is antibiotic resistance. Until recently, the paradigm has been that antibiotic resistance is selected by the presence of antibiotics because resistant mutations confer fitness costs in antibiotic free environments. In this study we show that it is not always the case, documenting the selection and fixation of resistant mutations in populations of Escherichia coli B that had never been exposed to antibiotics but instead evolved for 2000 generations at high temperature (42.2°C).
resultsWe found parallel mutations within the rpoB gene encoding the beta subunit of RNA polymerase. These amino acid substitutions conferred different levels of rifampicin resistance. The resistant mutations typically appeared, and were fixed, early in the evolution experiment. We confirmed the high advantage of these mutations at 42.2°C in glucose-limited medium. However, the rpoB mutations had different fitness effects across three genetic backgrounds and six environments.
conclusionsWe describe resistance mutations that are not necessarily costly in the absence of antibiotics or compensatory mutations but are highly beneficial at high temperature and low glucose. Their fitness effects depend on the environment and the genetic background, providing glimpses into the prevalence of epistasis and pleiotropy.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.