ArticleThe ISME journal2021
Spatial segregation and cooperation in radially expanding microbial colonies under antibiotic stress.
Article in The ISME journal, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed, 44 citations in OpenAlex.
- Cooperative antibiotic response in coupled biofilm and planktonicbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Minding the gap: collective determinants of multiscale structure across interacting bacterial colonies.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Slow spatial migration can help eradicate cooperative antimicrobial resistance in time-varying environments.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2026Review
- Linking spatial drug heterogeneity to microbial growth dynamics in theory and experiment.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Substrate toxicity drives successive range expansions opposing spatial intermixing in cross-feeding consortia.ISME communications · 2026Article
- Higher levels of antibiotic resistance are less competitive: the hidden ecological cost of no-metabolic cost resistance.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Strategies for biofilm inhibition: the role of synthetic drug- and nanotechnology-based agents.Archives of microbiology · 2025Review
- Article
- Advances in synthetic microbial ecosystems approach for studying ecological interactions and their influencing factors.Engineering microbiology · 2025Review
- Spatial population dynamics of bacterial colonies with social antibiotic resistance.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Uptake and leakage rates differentially shape community arrangement and composition of microbial consortia.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Linking spatial drug heterogeneity to microbial growth dynamics in theory and experiment.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Optogenetic patterning generates multi-strain biofilms with spatially distributed antibiotic resistance.Nature communications · 2024Article
- A growth-coupling strategy for improving the stability of terpenoid bioproduction in Escherichia coli.Microbial cell factories · 2024Article
- A 'rich-get-richer' mechanism drives patchy dynamics and resistance evolution in antibiotic-treated bacteria.Molecular systems biology · 2024Article
- Modeling spatial evolution of multi-drug resistance under drug environmental gradients.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Article
- Modeling spatial evolution of multi-drug resistance under drug environmental gradients.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Antibiotic resistance in bacterial communities.Current opinion in microbiology · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Antibiotic resistance in microbial communities reflects a combination of processes operating at different scales. In this work, we investigate the spatiotemporal dynamics of bacterial colonies comprised of drug-resistant and drug-sensitive cells undergoing range expansion under antibiotic stress. Using the opportunistic pathogen Enterococcus faecalis with plasmid-encoded β-lactamase, we track colony expansion dynamics and visualize spatial patterns in fluorescently labeled populations exposed to antibiotics. We find that the radial expansion rate of mixed communities is approximately constant over a wide range of drug concentrations and initial population compositions. Imaging of the final populations shows that resistance to ampicillin is cooperative, with sensitive cells surviving in the presence of resistant cells at otherwise lethal concentrations. The populations exhibit a diverse range of spatial segregation patterns that depend on drug concentration and initial conditions. Mathematical models indicate that the observed dynamics are consistent with global cooperation, despite the fact that β-lactamase remains cell-associated. Experiments confirm that resistant colonies provide a protective effect to sensitive cells on length scales multiple times the size of a single colony, and populations seeded with (on average) no more than a single resistant cell can produce mixed communities in the presence of the drug. While biophysical models of drug degradation suggest that individual resistant cells offer only short-range protection to neighboring cells, we show that long-range protection may arise from synergistic effects of multiple resistant cells, providing surprisingly large protection zones even at small population fractions.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.