If a community of bacteria contains both vulnerable and resistant cells, this can lead to a phenomenon called ‘cooperative resistance’. One way that bacteria resist antibiotics is by producing enzymes that inactivate specific drugs. Understanding the basis of resistance is crucial for developing new antibiotics, and for using current drugs more efficiently.
Although we rely on antibiotics to treat diseases caused by bacteria, such as tuberculosis, some bacteria are already resistant to many of the drugs available. eLife digestĪntibiotic resistance is a threat to human and animal health worldwide. Finally, we demonstrate how populations receiving immediate drug influx may sometimes thrive, while identical populations exposed to delayed drug influx collapse. These dynamics reflect competing density-dependent effects of different subpopulations, with growth of drug-sensitive cells increasing but growth of drug-resistant cells decreasing effective drug inhibition. Specifically, we demonstrate how density-dependent feedback loops couple population growth and antibiotic efficacy when communities include drug-resistant subpopulations, leading to a wide range of behavior, including population survival, collapse, or one of two qualitatively distinct bistable behaviors where survival is favored in either small or large populations. faecalis communities exposed to antibiotics can be surprisingly rich, revealing scenarios where increasing population size or delaying drug exposure can promote population collapse.
The molecular underpinnings of antibiotic resistance are increasingly understood, but less is known about how these molecular events influence microbial dynamics on the population scale.
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