Microbiology Commons^™

Persisters: A Distinct Physiological State Of E. Coli, Devang Shah, Zhigang Zhang, Arkady B. Khodursky, Niilo Kaldalu, Kristi Kurg, Kim Lewis

Kim Lewis

BackgroundBacterial populations contain persisters, phenotypic variants that constitute approximately 1% of cells in stationary phase and biofilm cultures. Multidrug tolerance of persisters is largely responsible for the inability of antibiotics to completely eradicate infections. Recent progress in understanding persisters is encouraging, but the main obstacle in understanding their nature was our inability to isolate these elusive cells from a wild-type population since their discovery in 1944. ResultsWe hypothesized that persisters are dormant cells with a low level of translation, and used this to physically sort dim E. coli cells which do not contain sufficient amounts of unstable GFP expressed from …