Antibiotic resilience: a necessary concept to complement antibiotic resistance?. Issue 1916 (4th December 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Carvalho, Gabriel; Forestier, Christiane; Mathias, Jean-Denis
• Is Part Of: Proceedings. Volume 286:Issue 1916(2019)
• Publication Date: 2019-12-04
• Subjects: antibiotic resistance -- antibiotic resilience -- bacterial persistence -- antibiotic tolerance -- phenotypic heterogeneity -- heteroresistance; Biology -- Periodicals; 570.5
• DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2019.2408
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0962-8452

Abstract

Abstract : Resilience is the capacity of systems to recover their initial state or functions after a disturbance. The concepts of resilience and resistance are complementary in ecology and both represent different aspects of the stability of ecosystems. However, antibiotic resilience is not used in clinical bacteriology whereas antibiotic resistance is a recognized major problem. To join the fields of ecology and clinical bacteriology, we first review the resilience concept from ecology, socio-ecological systems and microbiology where it is widely developed. We then review resilience-related concepts in microbiology, including bacterial tolerance and persistence, phenotypic heterogeneity and collective tolerance and resistance. We discuss how antibiotic resilience could be defined and argue that the use of this concept largely relies on its experimental measure and its clinical relevance. We review indicators in microbiology which could be used to reflect antibiotic resilience and used as valuable indicators to anticipate the capacity of bacteria to recover from antibiotic treatments.