ArticleThe ISME journal2023
Regulatory fine-tuning of mcr-1 increases bacterial fitness and stabilises antibiotic resistance in agricultural settings.
Article in The ISME journal, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 34 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
34 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Fitness costs of mobilised colistin resistance gene 3 (mcr-3): systematic review, epidemiological study, and functional analysis.EBioMedicine · 2025Pooled it
- Predicting resistance evolution to guide antibiotic development.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2026Review
- A functionally selectedApplied and environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- The shared evolutionary capacities of plasmids and extrachromosomal DNA.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2026Review
- Integrated poultry production as a reservoir ofMicrobial genomics · 2026Article
- Novel polymyxin resistance gene family mcr-12 from environmental Pigmentiphaga litoralis.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Molecular Epidemiology ofMicroorganisms · 2026Article
- Epistasis and co-adaptation in bacterial genome evolution.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2026Review
- Resistance potentiators: Evolutionary catalysts of antibiotic resistance.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Beyond resistance and tolerance: rethinking evolutionary responses to antibiotics from the perspective of individual bacterial cells.Nature communications · 2026Review
- Domestic travel as a driver for the dissemination ofAntimicrobial agents and chemotherapy · 2026Article
- Genome co-adaptation and the evolution of methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus.Genome biology · 2026Article
- Flattening Patterns of Antimicrobial Resistance Levels in Indicator E. coli in Dutch Livestock.Zoonoses and public health · 2026Article
- Eco-evolutionary responses to plasmid-dependent phage constrain the spread of multidrug-resistance plasmids.The ISME journal · 2026Article
- Administrative interventions in antimicrobial stewardship: a global scoping review of all WHO regions.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2026Review
- Host-dependent effects ofFrontiers in microbiology · 2026Article
- Inosine monophosphate overcomes the coexisting resistance of mcr-1 and blaJournal of advanced research · 2026Article
- Persistence of colistin-resistant Escherichia coli and the mcr-1 gene in the poultry chain, after the colistin ban.Veterinary research communications · 2025Article
- A functionally selectedbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Genomic evolution and stability of the mcr-1-harboring IncI2 plasmid in the presence and absence of colistin.BMC genomics · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Antibiotic resistance tends to carry fitness costs, making it difficult to understand how resistance can be maintained in the absence of continual antibiotic exposure. Here we investigate this problem in the context of mcr-1, a globally disseminated gene that confers resistance to colistin, an agricultural antibiotic that is used as a last resort for the treatment of multi-drug resistant infections. Here we show that regulatory evolution has fine-tuned the expression of mcr-1, allowing E. coli to reduce the fitness cost of mcr-1 while simultaneously increasing colistin resistance. Conjugative plasmids have transferred low-cost/high-resistance mcr-1 alleles across an incredible diversity of E. coli strains, further stabilising mcr-1 at the species level. Regulatory mutations were associated with increased mcr-1 stability in pig farms following a ban on the use of colistin as a growth promoter that decreased colistin consumption by 90%. Our study shows how regulatory evolution and plasmid transfer can combine to stabilise resistance and limit the impact of reducing antibiotic consumption.
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