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Understanding, predicting and manipulating the genotypic evolution of antibiotic resistance

Nature Reviews Genetics volume 14, pages 243–248 (2013)Cite this article

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Abstract

The evolution of antibiotic resistance can now be rapidly tracked with high-throughput technologies for bacterial genotyping and phenotyping. Combined with new approaches to evolve resistance in the laboratory and to characterize clinically evolved resistant pathogens, these methods are revealing the molecular basis and rate of evolution of antibiotic resistance under treatment regimens of single drugs or drug combinations. In this Progress article, we review these new tools for studying the evolution of antibiotic resistance and discuss how the genomic and evolutionary insights they provide could transform the diagnosis, treatment and predictability of antibiotic resistance in bacterial infections.

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Figure 1: Selection of antibiotic-resistant bacteria from experimental evolution.
Figure 2: Selection of antibiotic-resistant bacteria from clinical isolates.
Figure 3: Phylogenetic inference identifies parallel evolution.
Figure 4: Constrained evolutionary pathways to antibiotic resistance.

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Acknowledgements

We thank T. Lieberman for discussions on phylogeny and comments on the manuscript. This work was supported in part by US National Institutes of Health grants R01GM081617 and US National Institute of General Medical Science Center grant P50GM068763, and the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Adam C. Palmer is at the Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.,

    Adam C. Palmer

  2. Roy Kishony is at the Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA; and the Faculty of Biology, Technion — Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel.,

    Roy Kishony

  3. the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachussetts, USA,

    Roy Kishony

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  1. Adam C. Palmer
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Correspondence to Roy Kishony.

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Glossary

β-lactamase

An enzyme that can confer resistance to β-lactam antibiotics by catalysing their degradation.

Commensal microbes

Microbes living on or in a host without causing disease, although they typically include opportunistic pathogens.

Cross-resistance

The propensity of a genetic change that confers resistance to one drug also to affect resistance to a different drug (by either increasing or decreasing resistance).

dN/dS

The ratio of mutation rates at nonsynonymous (N) and synonymous (S) sites. dN/dS is increased by selection for amino acid changes (a signature of adaptive selection) and decreased by selection against amino acid changes (purifying selection).

Horizontal gene transfer

The acquisition of a gene by a means other than direct inheritance from a parent cell (vertical transfer). Common in many bacteria and archaea, mechanisms of horizontal gene transfer include transformation, conjugation and transduction.

Maximum likelihood and Bayesian approaches

This definition applies to the context of phylogenetics. Phylogenetic trees can be constructed by maximum parsimony, maximum likelihood and Bayesian inference. Maximum parsimony methods select from all possible trees the one containing the fewest mutations. Trees chosen by maximum likelihood and other Bayesian methods may contain more mutations, as they weigh the relative probabilities of different mutations according to various models.

Microfluidic device

Customized, microscopic chambers in which fluid flows can be precisely controlled. Applied to microbiology, these allow the study of bacterial behaviour in spatially and temporally controllable environments.

Monotherapy

Chemical therapy by a single drug.

Parallel evolution

When the same mutations (or a range of mutations in the same gene) repeatedly occur in independent lineages; this provides an indication that these mutations may have been fixed by positive selection rather than by chance.

Proto-resistance genes

Evolutionary precursors to drug-resistance genes that do not yet contribute to drug resistance but may do so on mutation and selection by drug stress.

Resistance cassettes

A genetic element containing one or more drug resistance genes, often carried in transposable elements or plasmids that facilitate horizontal gene transfer.

Transposon mutagenesis

The insertion of transposons at random locations throughout a genome to generate a library of different gene disruptions. Transposons can be constructed with outward-facing promoters also to introduce gene overexpression into the library.

Turbidostats

Devices that maintain constant cell density (turbidity) in a continuously growing microbial culture by routinely removing a small volume of culture and replacing it with fresh sterile media.

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Palmer, A., Kishony, R. Understanding, predicting and manipulating the genotypic evolution of antibiotic resistance. Nat Rev Genet 14, 243–248 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg3351

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