ArticleNature communications2024
Bacteria can compensate the fitness costs of amplified resistance genes via a bypass mechanism.
Article in Nature communications, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers.
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Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed.
- Within-patient carbapenem heteroresistance inCurrent research in microbial sciences · 2026Article
- Population size modulates the transition from gene amplification-mediated heteroresistance to stable resistance.npj antimicrobials and resistance · 2026Article
- Bacterial adaptation to essential oils and their main compounds in food systems: mechanisms related to antibacterial resistance.NPJ science of food · 2026Review
- Simulating the host niche: balancing complexity and control in the experimental evolution of antibiotic resistance and pathoadaptation.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2026Review
- Cobalt and nickel ion synergy promotes gene amplification and stable metal resistance inApplied and environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- Bacterial heteroresistance mechanisms, dynamics, and emerging diagnostic approaches.Bioscience reports · 2026Review
- Gain and loss of plasmid-borne antibiotic resistance genes are associated with chromosomal resistance presence in Enterobacteriaceae.mSystems · 2026Article
- Structure-Activity Relationship Study of Antimicrobial Peptide with Cross-Kingdom Activity.Biochemistry · 2026Article
- Rapid Adaptive Evolution under Combination Therapy inACS infectious diseases · 2026Article
- Screen for signatures of positive selection in the core genome ofMicrobial genomics · 2026Article
- Assessing the Ecological Roles of Resistomes within Microbial Communities in Antibiotic-contaminated Ecosystems.Microbial ecology · 2026Review
- High-resolution, high-throughput detection of hidden antibiotic resistance with the dilution-and-delay (DnD) susceptibility assay.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Novel Insights into Carbapenem Resistance: Mechanisms, Diagnostics, and Future Directions.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Genomic Exaptation and Regulatory Landscape Shifts as Key Mechanisms Enabling Flatworm Terrestrialization.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Article
- The dynamic distribution of genetic tandem amplifications in a heteroresistant Escherichia coli population revealed by ultra-deep long read sequencing.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Evolution and rise of antimicrobial resistance in key public health bacteria within and across the One Health sectors.Future microbiology · 2026Review
- Microbial interactions in facilitating antibiotic activity and resistance evolution.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2026Review
- Intermittent antibiotic exposure of Escherichia coli biofilms drives resistance in catheter-associated infection models.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2026Article
- Resistance, heteroresistance, and fitness costs drive colistin treatment failure duringProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Fitness cost and biofilm formation in fosfomycin-resistant clinicalTurkish journal of medical sciences · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Antibiotic heteroresistance is a phenotype in which a susceptible bacterial population includes a small subpopulation of cells that are more resistant than the main population. Such resistance can arise by tandem amplification of DNA regions containing resistance genes that in single copy are not sufficient to confer resistance. However, tandem amplifications often carry fitness costs, manifested as reduced growth rates. Here, we investigated if and how these fitness costs can be genetically ameliorated. We evolved four clinical isolates of three bacterial species that show heteroresistance to tobramycin, gentamicin and tetracyclines at increasing antibiotic concentrations above the minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC) of the main susceptible population. This led to a rapid enrichment of resistant cells with up to an 80-fold increase in the resistance gene copy number, an increased MIC, and severely reduced growth rates. When further evolved in the presence of antibiotic, these strains acquired compensatory resistance mutations and showed a reduction in copy number while maintaining high-level resistance. A deterministic model indicated that the loss of amplified units was driven mainly by their fitness costs and that the compensatory mutations did not affect the loss rate of the gene amplifications. Our findings suggest that heteroresistance mediated by copy number changes can facilitate and precede the evolution towards stable resistance.
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