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Microbiology

Pumping persisters

Nature volume 534, pages 41–42 (2016)Cite this article

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The finding that antibiotics are pumped out of drug-tolerant bacterial cells by the TolC protein complex provides insight into how some cells, known as persisters, survive in the face of antibiotic treatments.

In bacterial persistence, a small fraction of an antibiotic-sensitive cell population has switched to a slow-growing or dormant state, and is drug tolerant1,2. This differs from antibiotic resistance in that regrowth of a persistent population results in the same percentage of drug-sensitive cells as before. Persistence has been interpreted as a bet-hedging strategy that increases the survival rates of bacterial populations3,4, and is medically relevant because it might sustain recurrent and chronic infections. Writing in Molecular Cell, Pu et al.5 challenge the widespread view that persistence is a passive state. The authors demonstrate that persister cells use an energy-dependent efflux pump protein called TolC to actively reduce the intracellular accumulation of antibiotic — a finding that might have both fundamental and therapeutic relevance.

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Figure 1: A subpopulation in efflux.

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  1. Kenn Gerdes and Szabolcs Semsey are in the Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen, DK-2200 Copenhagen, Denmark.

    Kenn Gerdes & Szabolcs Semsey

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  1. Kenn Gerdes
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  2. Szabolcs Semsey
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Correspondence to Kenn Gerdes.

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Gerdes, K., Semsey, S. Pumping persisters. Nature 534, 41–42 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature18442

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