Evolutionary pathways to antibiotic resistance are dependent upon environmental structure and bacterial lifestyle
- University of Pittsburgh, United States
Abstract
Bacterial populations vary in their stress tolerance and population structure depending upon whether growth occurs in well-mixed or structured environments. We hypothesized that evolution in biofilms would generate greater genetic diversity than well-mixed environments and lead to different pathways of antibiotic resistance. We used experimental evolution and whole genome sequencing to test how the biofilm lifestyle influenced the rate, genetic mechanisms, and pleiotropic effects of resistance to ciprofloxacin in Acinetobacter baumannii populations. Both evolutionary dynamics and the identities of mutations differed between lifestyle. Planktonic populations experienced selective sweeps of mutations including the primary topoisomerase drug targets, whereas biofilm-adapted populations acquired mutations in regulators of efflux pumps. An overall trade-off between fitness and resistance level emerged, wherein biofilm-adapted clones were less resistant than planktonic but more fit in the absence of drug. However, biofilm populations developed collateral sensitivity to cephalosporins, demonstrating the clinical relevance of lifestyle on the evolution of resistance.
Data availability
Sequencing data were deposited to NCBI as Bioproject 485123.R code for filtering and data processing can be found here:https://github.com/sirmicrobe/U01_allele_freq_code.
Article and author information
Author details
Alfonso Santos-Lopez
Funding
National Institutes of Health (U01AI124302-01)
- Vaughn S Cooper
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Karla Kirkegaard, Stanford University School of Medicine, United States
Publication history
- Received: April 11, 2019
- Accepted: September 13, 2019
- Accepted Manuscript published: September 13, 2019 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: October 25, 2019 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2019, Santos-Lopez et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Evolutionary pathways to antibiotic resistance are dependent upon environmental structure and bacterial lifestyle
eLife 8:e47612.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.47612
Further reading
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- Evolutionary Biology
- Microbiology and Infectious Disease
The way that bacteria grow – either floating in liquid or attached to a surface – affects their ability to evolve antimicrobial resistance and our ability to treat infections.
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- Genetics and Genomics
- Evolutionary Biology
Brain size and cortical folding have increased and decreased recurrently during mammalian evolution. Identifying genetic elements whose sequence or functional properties co-evolve with these traits can provide unique information on evolutionary and developmental mechanisms. A good candidate for such a comparative approach is TRNP1, as it controls proliferation of neural progenitors in mice and ferrets. Here, we investigate the contribution of both regulatory and coding sequences of TRNP1 to brain size and cortical folding in over 30 mammals. We find that the rate of TRNP1 protein evolution (ω) significantly correlates with brain size, slightly less with cortical folding and much less with body size. This brain correlation is stronger than for >95% of random control proteins. This co-evolution is likely affecting TRNP1 activity, as we find that TRNP1 from species with larger brains and more cortical folding induce higher proliferation rates in neural stem cells. Furthermore, we compare the activity of putative cis-regulatory elements (CREs) of TRNP1 in a massively parallel reporter assay and identify one CRE that likely co-evolves with cortical folding in Old World monkeys and apes. Our analyses indicate that coding and regulatory changes that increased TRNP1 activity were positively selected either as a cause or a consequence of increases in brain size and cortical folding. They also provide an example how phylogenetic approaches can inform biological mechanisms, especially when combined with molecular phenotypes across several species.
