ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Community interactions drive the evolution of antibiotic tolerance in bacteria.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers.
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed, 55 citations in OpenAlex.
- Predicting resistance evolution to guide antibiotic development.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2026Review
- SynComs should be rigorously defined, not renamed.Nature communications · 2026Article
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- Mapping the landscape of mathematical models for antimicrobial resistance: a scoping review.BMC public health · 2026Article
- Cooperative antibiotic response in coupled biofilm and planktonicbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Assessing the Ecological Roles of Resistomes within Microbial Communities in Antibiotic-contaminated Ecosystems.Microbial ecology · 2026Review
- Counting-based inference of mutant growth rates from pooled sequencing across growth regimes.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- An Engineered Solidified Peptide Hemocyte Sponge as Nanomotor Storage to Combat Bacterial Colitis.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Acidifying bacteria inhibit pathogenic bacteria more strongly with increasing glucose.The ISME journal · 2026Article
- Influence of cell-cell distance on the ecology and evolution of microbial communities.The ISME journal · 2026Review
- Coexistence rules for small, antagonistically interacting microbial communities.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Community Complexity Does Not Weaken Pairwise Coevolution in a Soil Bacterial Community.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Article
- Strengthen or Weaken: Evolutionary Directions of Cross-Feeding After Formation.Environmental microbiology reports · 2025Review
- Article
- Deciphering and steering population-level response under spatial drug heterogeneity on microhabitat structures.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- M.marinum lacking epsH shows increased biofilm formation in vitro and boosted antibiotic tolerance in zebrafish.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2025Article
- Coevolutionary history of predation constrains the evolvability of antibiotic resistance in prey bacteria.npj antimicrobials and resistance · 2025Article
- Forging the iron-net: Towards a quantitative understanding of microbial communities via siderophore-mediated interactions.Quantitative biology (Beijing, China) · 2025Article
- Antibiotic-mediated microbial community restructuring is dictated by variability in antibiotic-induced lysis rates and population interactions.Nature communications · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
The emergence of antibiotic tolerance (prolonged survival against exposure) in natural bacterial populations is a major concern. Since it has been studied primarily in isogenic populations, we do not yet understand how ecological interactions in a diverse community impact the evolution of tolerance. To address this, we studied the evolutionary dynamics of a synthetic bacterial community composed of two interacting strains. In this community, an antibiotic-resistant strain protected the other, susceptible strain by degrading the antibiotic ampicillin in the medium. Surprisingly, we found that in the presence of antibiotics, the susceptible strain evolved tolerance. Tolerance was typified by an increase in survival as well as an accompanying decrease in the growth rate, highlighting a trade-off between the two. A simple mathematical model explained that the observed decrease in the death rate, even when coupled with a decreased growth rate, is beneficial in a community with weak protective interactions. In the presence of strong interactions, the model predicted that the trade-off would instead be detrimental, and tolerance would not emerge, which we experimentally verified. By whole genome sequencing the evolved tolerant isolates, we identified two genetic hot spots which accumulated mutations in parallel lines, suggesting their association with tolerance. Our work highlights that ecological interactions can promote antibiotic tolerance in bacterial communities, which has remained understudied.
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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.