The fitness costs of antibiotic resistance mutations

By A. Melnyk, Alex Wong, R. Kassen. Evolutionary Applications, 2014

650 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Antibiotic resistance is increasing in pathogenic microbial populations and is thus a major threat to public health. The fate of a resistance mutation in pathogen populations is determined in part by its fitness. Mutations that suffer little or no fitness cost are more likely to persist in the absence of antibiotic treatment. In this review, we performed a meta‐analysis to investigate the fitness costs associated with single mutational events that confer resistance. Generally, these mutations were costly, although several drug classes and species of bacteria on average did not show a cost. Further investigations into the rate and fitness values of compensatory mutations that alleviate the costs of resistance will help us to better understand both the emergence and management of antibiotic resistance in clinical settings.

Subfields: Genetics, Molecular Medicine, Pharmacology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/115d23a14583c0b91188526a92ffa92d95010d54

Citations in the corpus

• Environmental factors influencing the development and spread of antibiotic resistance (2017, neutral): “Certain mutations have little or no fitness cost, but there seems to be a tendency that those also confer lower degree of resistance than more costly mutations, at least for some antibiotics (Melnyk, Wong and Kassen 2015).”