ArticleNature ecology & evolution2021
Bottleneck size and selection level reproducibly impact evolution of antibiotic resistance.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers.
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Who cites it
37 citing papers in PubMed, 75 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
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- Novel continuous experimental evolution methodology uncovers rapid resistance development and cross-resistance.npj antimicrobials and resistance · 2026Article
- Slow spatial migration can help eradicate cooperative antimicrobial resistance in time-varying environments.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Microbial interactions in facilitating antibiotic activity and resistance evolution.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2026Review
- Proteome-wide remodelling in Klebsiella pneumoniae during step-wise adaptive evolution against colistin.PloS one · 2026Article
- Antibiotics and priority effects on colonizing resistant Escherichia coli strain assemblages in a community setting.PloS one · 2026Article
- Evolution of beta-lactam resistance causes fitness reductions and several cases of collateral sensitivities in the human pathogenAntimicrobial agents and chemotherapy · 2025Article
- Evolutionary dynamics in the genome of ocularMicrobial genomics · 2025Article
- Article
- Experimental evolution ofMicrobiology spectrum · 2025Article
- From Metagenomes to Functional Expression of Resistance:Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- The Secondary Resistome of Methicillin-ResistantAntibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Drug delivery dynamics dictate evolution of bacterial antibiotic responses.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Bacteria and host: what does this mean for sepsis bottleneck?World journal of emergency medicine · 2025Review
- Chloramphenicol and gentamicin reduce the evolution of resistance to phage ΦX174 by suppressing a subset of E. coli LPS mutants.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Pathogen-encoded Rum DNA polymerase drives rapid bacterial drug resistance.Nucleic acids research · 2024Article
- Dynamics of drug delivery determines course of evolution of antibiotic responses in bacteria.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Mutant fate in spatially structured populations on graphs: Connecting models to experiments.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Effects of periodic bottlenecks on the dynamics of adaptive evolution in microbial populations.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
During antibiotic treatment, the evolution of bacterial pathogens is fundamentally affected by bottlenecks and varying selection levels imposed by the drugs. Bottlenecks-that is, reductions in bacterial population size-lead to an increased influence of random effects (genetic drift) during bacterial evolution, and varying antibiotic concentrations during treatment may favour distinct resistance variants. Both aspects influence the process of bacterial evolution during antibiotic therapy and thereby treatment outcome. Surprisingly, the joint influence of these interconnected factors on the evolution of antibiotic resistance remains largely unexplored. Here we combine evolution experiments with genomic and genetic analyses to demonstrate that bottleneck size and antibiotic-induced selection reproducibly impact the evolutionary path to resistance in pathogenic Pseudomonas aeruginosa, one of the most problematic opportunistic human pathogens. Resistance is favoured-expectedly-under high antibiotic selection and weak bottlenecks, but-unexpectedly-also under low antibiotic selection and severe bottlenecks. The latter is likely to result from a reduced probability of losing favourable variants through drift under weak selection. Moreover, the absence of high resistance under low selection and weak bottlenecks is caused by the spread of low-resistance variants with high competitive fitness under these conditions. We conclude that bottlenecks, in combination with drug-induced selection, are currently neglected key determinants of pathogen evolution and outcome of antibiotic treatment.
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