Resonant activation: a strategy against bacterial persistence

Resonant activation: a strategy against bacterial persistence.

A bacterial colony may develop a small number of cells genetically identical to, but phenotypically different from, other normally growing bacteria. These so-called persister cells keep themselves in a dormant state and thus are insensitive to antibiotic treatment, resulting in serious problems of drug resistance. In this paper, we proposed a novel strategy to 'kill' persister cells by triggeri...

Bacterial persistence: a winning strategy?

It has long been known that antibiotic treatment will not completely kill off a bacteria population. For many species a small fraction of bacteria is not sensitive to antibiotics. These bacteria are said to persist. Recently it has been shown that persistence is not a permanent state and that in fact a bacterium can switch back and forth between persistent and non persistent states. We introduc...

Targeting Bacterial Persistence to Develop Therapeutics Against Infectious Disease

A genetic strategy to identify targets for the development of drugs that prevent bacterial persistence.

Antibacterial drug development suffers from a paucity of targets whose inhibition kills replicating and nonreplicating bacteria. The latter include phenotypically dormant cells, known as persisters, which are tolerant to many antibiotics and often contribute to failure in the treatment of chronic infections. This is nowhere more apparent than in tuberculosis caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis...

Silver nanoparticles as an alternative strategy against bacterial biofilms.

Biofilms are complex bacterial communities that resist the action of antibiotics and the human immune system. Bacteria within biofilms are the cause of numerous, almost impossible to eradicate, persistent infections. Biofilms can form on many medical devices and implants, and so have an enormous impact on medicine. Due to the lack of effective anti-biofilm antibiotics, novel alternative compoun...