Christiane Goulart and Miriam Barlow and colleagues have published an important study in this month’s PLOS One entitled “Designing Antibiotic Cycling Strategies by Determining and Understanding Local Adaptive Landscapes.”
Because of the growing problem of antibiotic resistance, antibiotic cycling has been proposed as a strategy to preserve antibiotic susceptibility of disease-causing microbes. Unfortunately, these efforts have largely been disappointing. In 2004 Carl Bergstrom argued that antibiotic cycling was likely to be ineffective in the hospital setting, based on a computational approach informed by natural selection. At that time, Bergstrom left open the possibility that a cycling regime could work, but he warned that the theoretical underpinnings of such an approach had not been demonstrated.
Goulart, Barlow and colleagues have satisfied that precondition with their compelling recent study. (more…)