J Carlos R Hernandez-Beltran, Jerónimo Rodríguez-Beltrán, Oscar Bruno Aguilar-Luviano, Jesús Velez-Santiago, Octavio Mondragón-Palomino, R Craig MacLean, Ayari Fuentes-Hernández, Alvaro San Millán, Rafael Peña-Miller
The rise of antibiotic resistance is a critical public health concern, requiring an understanding of mechanisms that enable bacteria to tolerate antimicrobial agents. Bacteria use diverse strategies, including the amplification of drug-resistance genes. In this paper, we showed that multicopy plasmids, often carrying antibiotic resistance genes in clinical bacteria, can rapidly amplify genes, leading to plasmid-mediated phenotypic noise and transient antibiotic resistance. By combining stochastic simulations of a computational model with high-throughput single-cell measurements of blaTEM-1 expression in Escherichia coli MG1655, we showed that plasmid copy number variability stably maintains populations composed of cells with both low and high plasmid copy numbers...
March 23, 2024: Nature Communications