What are Persisters in bacteria?
Persisters are a subpopulation of transiently antibiotic-tolerant bacterial cells that are often slow-growing or growth-arrested, and are able to resume growth after a lethal stress.
Are Persisters antibiotic resistant?
Antibiotic tolerant persister cells are not antibiotic resistant mutants. Resistance is caused by newly acquired genetic traits (by mutation or horizontal gene transfer) that are heritable and confer the ability to grow at elevated concentrations of antibiotics.
What is bacterial eradication?
Active bacterial eradication is a strategy aimed at optimizing the treatment of infection while minimizing the risk of selection, carriage and spread of resistant strains. However, therapeutic choice becomes more limited as multi-resistant strains become more prevalent.
How do you treat persister cells?
As persister cells are dormant and resistant to traditional antibiotics (e.g. fluoroquinolones, aminoglycosides and β‐lactams), microbial biotechnological approaches have been developed to kill sleeping cells.
What best defines the term persisters?
exponential. What best defines the term “persisters”? cells with relatively slow metabolic rates that survive longer than others during the death phase and that can cause chronic infections.
What are persisters in TB?
Bacterial persisters are a subpopulation of cells that exhibit phenotypic resistance during exposure to a lethal dose of antibiotics. They are difficult to target and thought to contribute to the long treatment duration required for tuberculosis.
What are Persisters in TB?
How do Persister cells arise?
Persisters are stress tolerant cells that arise due to metabolic inactivity (Hobby et al., 1942; Bigger, 1944; Kwan et al., 2013; Pontes and Groisman, 2019) and without genetic change (Lewis, 2010).
What is bacterial persistency?
Bacterial persistence is a state in which a sub-population of dormant cells, or ‘persisters’, tolerates antibiotic treatment. Bacterial persisters have been implicated in biofilms and in chronic and recurrent infections.
What are bacterial persisters?
The majority of persisters are nonreplicating bacteria that are tolerant to multiple antibiotics. Bacterial persisters are thought to be responsible for relapse of infections. Toxin–antitoxin (TA) modules are involved in the formation of bacterial persisters. Persister formation can be stimulated by triggers such as interaction with host cells.
How do you kill persister bacteria?
Another efficient way to kill persister bacteria is by small molecule compounds. Screening of chemical libraries has identified compounds that act either specifically, by affecting persisters and forcing them to revert to antibiotic-sensitive bacteria [73], or nonspecifically, by affecting all bacterial cells of a population [4].
Is the metabolic environment important for successful antibiotic eradication of persisters?
These results suggest that the metabolic environment is important for successful antibiotic eradication of persisters [2].