ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2015
The SOS response increases bacterial fitness, but not evolvability, under a sublethal dose of antibiotic.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 38 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
38 citing papers in PubMed, 65 citations in OpenAlex.
- Resistance potentiators: Evolutionary catalysts of antibiotic resistance.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- The Role of the SOS Response in the Adaptation ofCurrent issues in molecular biology · 2026Review
- Phage provoke growth delays and SOS response induction despite CRISPR-Cas protection.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Insights into antibiotic resistance promoted by quinolone exposure.Antimicrobial agents and chemotherapy · 2025Article
- Evolution takes multiple paths to evolvability when facing environmental change.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The SOS Response Activation and the Risk of Antibiotic Resistance Enhancement inInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2024Article
- Antibacterial Mechanisms and Clinical Impact of Sitafloxacin.Pharmaceuticals (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Iron Chelator DIBI Suppresses Formation of Ciprofloxacin-Induced Antibiotic Resistance inAntibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Ecological effects of stress drive bacterial evolvability under sub-inhibitory antibiotic treatments.ISME communications · 2022Article
- Activation of class 1 integron integrase is promoted in the intestinal environment.PLoS genetics · 2022Article
- RecA and Specialized Error-Prone DNA Polymerases Are Not Required for Mutagenesis and Antibiotic Resistance Induced by Fluoroquinolones inAntibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- NaturalizedFrontiers in microbiology · 2022Review
- Cellular heterogeneity in DNA alkylation repair increases population genetic plasticity.Nucleic acids research · 2021Article
- Sub-Inhibitory Antibiotic Exposure and Virulence inAntibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- Risk Factors for and Mechanisms ofOpen forum infectious diseases · 2021Article
- Elucidating the Antimycobacterial Mechanism of Action of Ciprofloxacin Using Metabolomics.Microorganisms · 2021Article
- Article
- Prophage Activation in the Intestine: Insights Into Functions and Possible Applications.Frontiers in microbiology · 2021Review
- Quinolones: Mechanism, Lethality and Their Contributions to Antibiotic Resistance.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Review
- Bacterial antibiotic resistance development and mutagenesis following exposure to subinhibitory concentrations of fluoroquinolonesJAC-antimicrobial resistance · 2020Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Exposure to antibiotics induces the expression of mutagenic bacterial stress-response pathways, but the evolutionary benefits of these responses remain unclear. One possibility is that stress-response pathways provide a short-term advantage by protecting bacteria against the toxic effects of antibiotics. Second, it is possible that stress-induced mutagenesis provides a long-term advantage by accelerating the evolution of resistance. Here, we directly measure the contribution of the Pseudomonas aeruginosa SOS pathway to bacterial fitness and evolvability in the presence of sublethal doses of ciprofloxacin. Using short-term competition experiments, we demonstrate that the SOS pathway increases competitive fitness in the presence of ciprofloxacin. Continued exposure to ciprofloxacin results in the rapid evolution of increased fitness and antibiotic resistance, but we find no evidence that SOS-induced mutagenesis accelerates the rate of adaptation to ciprofloxacin during a 200 generation selection experiment. Intriguingly, we find that the expression of the SOS pathway decreases during adaptation to ciprofloxacin, and this helps to explain why this pathway does not increase long-term evolvability. Furthermore, we argue that the SOS pathway fails to accelerate adaptation to ciprofloxacin because the modest increase in the mutation rate associated with SOS mutagenesis is offset by a decrease in the effective strength of selection for increased resistance at a population level. Our findings suggest that the primary evolutionary benefit of the SOS response is to increase bacterial competitive ability, and that stress-induced mutagenesis is an unwanted side effect, and not a selected attribute, of this pathway.
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Registered trials
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.