Persisters show heritable phenotype and generate bacterial heterogeneity and noise in protein expression
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- Department of Animal and Avian Sciences, University of Maryland, USA
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- Document Type:
- Manuscript
- Date:
- Received 06 April 2009 19:21 UTC; Posted 06 April 2009
- Subjects:
- Microbiology
- Abstract:
Persisters are a small subpopulation of bacteria that survive a lethal concentration of antibiotic without antibiotic resistance genes. Isolation of persisters from normally dividing population is considered difficult due to their slow growth, low numbers and phenotypic shift i.e. when re-grown in antibiotic free medium, they revert to parent population. Inability to isolate persisters is a major hindrance in this field of research. Here we reject the ‘phenotypic shift’ phenomenon exhibited by persisters. Persisters, on the other hand, exhibit a heritable phenotype and can be easily isolated from a normally dividing population that allows their selective growth. Rather than a single subset, they comprise many distinct subgroups each exhibiting different growth rates, colony sizes, antibiotic tolerance and protein expression levels. Clearly, they are one of the sources of bacterial heterogeneity and noise in protein expression. Existence of persisters in normally dividing population can explain some of the unsolved puzzles like antibiotic tolerance, post-antibiotic effect and viable but non-culturable bacterial state. We hypothesize that persisters are aging bacteria.
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- This document is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
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Jacob, Jaison. Persisters show heritable phenotype and generate bacterial heterogeneity and noise in protein expression. Available from Nature Precedings <http://hdl.handle.net/10101/npre.2009.1411.2> (2009)
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Other versions of this document in Nature Precedings
Version number Document title Date v1 Posted 13 December 2007 Other versions of this document elsewhere on the web
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