ArticleMicrobiology spectrum2022
L-Form Switching in Escherichia coli as a Common β-Lactam Resistance Mechanism.
Article in Microbiology spectrum, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 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
16 citing papers in PubMed, 17 citations in OpenAlex.
- Bacterial strategies for surviving antibiotics during urinary tract infection: could uropathogenic Escherichia coli be persisters?Nature reviews. Urology · 2026Review
- Phage therapy: from basic biology to clinical application.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2026Review
- Flip Flop-Associated Growth and Division of Synthetic Cells.ACS nano · 2026Article
- Bacterial L-forms: Key Mechanisms of Drug Resistance, Disease Recurrence, and Immune Evasion.Indian journal of microbiology · 2026Review
- From hype to hope: reanimating phage therapy through evidence-based multidisciplinarity.Nature communications · 2026Review
- Synergistic action of peptidoglycan and teichoic acid synthesis inhibitors leads to cell death by oxidative damage.Communications biology · 2026Article
- A microphysiological human mini-bladder reveals urine-urothelium interplay in tissue resilience and UPEC recurrence in urinary tract infections.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Continuous secretory production in E. coli enables scalable, high-titer manufacturing of active recombinant endonucleases.Journal of biological engineering · 2025Article
- Impact of Host and Bacterial Metabolism on Antibiotic Susceptibility.Biochemistry · 2025Review
- Article
- Are envelope stress responses essential for persistence to β-lactams inAntimicrobial agents and chemotherapy · 2023Article
- New Strategies to Kill Metabolically-Dormant Cells Directly Bypassing the Need for Active Cellular Processes.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- L-form conversion in Gram-positive bacteria enables escape from phage infection.Nature microbiology · 2023Article
- Ecology and Evolutionary Biology of Hindering Phage Therapy: The Phage Tolerance vs. Phage Resistance of Bacterial Biofilms.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Reversible bacteriophage resistance by shedding the bacterial cell wall.Open biology · 2022Article
- Cell wall deficiency as an escape mechanism from phage infection.Open biology · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cell wall deficient bacterial L-forms are induced by exposure to cell wall-targeting antibiotics and immune effectors such as lysozyme. L-forms of different bacteria (including Escherichia coli) have been reported in human infections, but whether this is a normal adaptive strategy or simply an artifact of antibiotic treatment in certain bacterial species remains unclear. Here we show that members of a representative, diverse set of pathogenic E. coli readily proliferate as L-forms in supratherapeutic concentrations of the broad-spectrum antibiotic meropenem. We report that they are completely resistant to antibiotics targeting any penicillin-binding proteins in this state, including PBP1A/1B, PBP2, PBP3, PBP4, and PBP5/6. Importantly, we observed that reversion to the cell-walled state occurs efficiently, less than 20 h after antibiotic cessation, with few or no changes in DNA sequence. We defined for the first time a logarithmic L-form growth phase with a doubling time of 80 to 190 min, followed by a stationary phase in late cultures. We further demonstrated that L-forms are metabolically active and remain normally susceptible to antibiotics that affect DNA torsion and ribosomal function. Our findings provide insights into the biology of L-forms and help us understand the risk of β-lactam failure in persistent infections in which L-forms may be common.
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.