Stochastic nature of bacterial eradication using antibiotics

School of Physics Soft Condensed Matter & Physics of Living Systems: Prof. Minsu Kim, Emory University

Frequent failure of antibiotic treatment is becoming a serious threat to public health. Various studies of human patients or simple model systems of infection show that antibiotic treatments still fail even when infection-causing bacteria are not resistant to the antibiotics used. In this talk, I will present our recent experimental data revealing that antibiotics induce stochastic fluctuations in bacterial populations and the fluctuations lead to inconsistent treatment outcomes. Then, I will discuss a therapeutic strategy to exploit the fluctuations to facilitate treatment success.