Abstract

Background
Bacterial populations contain persisters, phenotypic variants that constitute approximately 1% of cells in stationary phase and biofilm cultures. Multidrug tolerance of persisters is largely responsible for the inability of antibiotics to completely eradicate infections. Recent progress in understanding persisters is encouraging, but the main obstacle in understanding their nature was our inability to isolate these elusive cells from a wild-type population since their discovery in 1944.


Results
We hypothesized that persisters are dormant cells with a low level of translation, and used this to physically sort dim E. coli cells which do not contain sufficient amounts of unstable GFP expressed from a promoter whose activity depends on the growth rate. The dim cells were tolerant to antibiotics and exhibited a gene expression profile distinctly different from those observed for cells in exponential or stationary phases. Genes coding for toxin-antitoxin module proteins were expressed in persisters and are likely contributors to this condition.


Conclusion
We report a method for persister isolation and conclude that these cells represent a distinct state of bacterial physiology.

Notes

Originally published in BMC Microbiology, 6:53 (2006). doi:10.1186/1471-2180-6-53

Keywords

bacteria, persisters, multidrug tolerance, antibiotics

Subject Categories

Multidrug resistance, Antibiotics, Drug resistance in microorganisms, Escherichia coli

Disciplines

Bacteriology

Publisher

BioMedCentral

Publication Date

6-12-2006

Rights Information

Copyright 2006. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Rights Holder

Devang Shah, Zhigang Zhang, Arkady B. Khodursky, Niilo Kaldalu, Kristi Kurg, Kim Lewis

Additional Files
persisters gene expression data.xls (208 kB)
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Additional Files

persisters gene expression data.xls (208 kB)
Table

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