Antibiotic Resistance as a Function of Bacterial Growth

The rising incidence of antimicrobial resistance in bacterial pathogens is a global health crisis, and a better understanding of how this resistance originates is critical to developing strategies to overcome the problem. Now, researchers have used a novel imaging model to elucidate the role of bacterial growth in predisposition to antibiotic resistance. With a microfluidic cell system and time-lapse microscopy, they measured the growth rate of single Escherichia coli cells with and without exposure to subinhibitory and inhibitory levels of nine different antibiotics.

There was a measurable variation in growth rates between bacterial cells, and while growth rates decreased with exposure to antibiotics, the degree of variation in growth rates…