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What counters antibiotic resistance in nature?

Nature Chemical Biology volume 8, pages 2–5 (2012)Cite this article

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Antibiotics promote the spread of resistance in the clinic, but various mechanisms may exist in natural environments that tilt the balance toward antibiotic sensitivity. Studying such mechanisms could help us understand the evolutionary dynamics of resistance and sensitivity in the wild, which may inspire new therapeutic strategies.

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Figure 1: The dynamics of antibiotic resistance in clinical settings may profoundly differ from that in the natural environment (schematic illustration).
Figure 2: Synergistic and suppressive antibiotic combinations respectively enhance and invert selection for resistance to their components.
Figure 3: The degradation products of antibiotics can select against resistance.
Figure 4: Differential inhibition assay identifies products of soil microbes that exert selection for or against tetracycline resistance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Remy Chait and Kalin Vetsigian are in the Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.,

    Remy Chait & Kalin Vetsigian

  2. Roy Kishony is in the Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and is a visiting professor at the Faculty of Biology, Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel.,

    Roy Kishony

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  1. Remy Chait
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Correspondence to Roy Kishony.

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Chait, R., Vetsigian, K. & Kishony, R. What counters antibiotic resistance in nature?. Nat Chem Biol 8, 2–5 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchembio.745

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