Arrest and Tolerate

摘要

When starving bacteria arrest their growth, they can resist killing by nearly all classes of antibiotics. Starvation is also a major cause of drug tolerance in biofilms, a bacterial community structure found in many chronic infections. Nguyen et al. (p. 982; see the Perspective by Belenky and Collins) show that such antibiotic tolerance occurs, not because the targets for antibiotics have become inactive during growth arrest, but because starvation-sensing mechanisms generate protective responses.