The data was generated by 5 different people Lieze Agten, Sang Nguyen, Nele Geerts, Laurence Van Moll and Laure Verstraete. It was fun to put this together with @philipruelens.bsky.social ! Big thanks to everyone else involved and of course to my funding @fwovlaanderen.bsky.social!

This likely is one of my final works @michielslab.bsky.social lab and largely was a collaborative effort between his @kuleuven.bsky.social team within @vibmicrobes.bsky.social and the team of Paul Cos @uantwerpen.be .

What does this all mean? MIC levels clearly are bad at predicting another important aspect of how bacteria deal with antibiotic treatments. Depending on the relevance of heterotolerance in the clinic, only assessing MIC values (current practice) could fail to inform clinicians.

In addition to the high amount of noise, there are also very significant outliers: i.e. strains that show no resistance but are highly antibiotic tolerant or strains with significant resistance but highly sensitive towards antibiotic-induced killing.

Put differently, while a higher MIC value (resistance) generally means the strain will also display higher survival, this is far from a 1-1 relationship. The relationship is so weak that variation in MIC values only explain 11.4% of the variation in heterotolerance levels.

It turns out that, while there is some positive correlation which one could expect, this correlation is very weak and highly dependent on the antibiotic x species.

Assessing the survival has been a tremendous body of work and while we are working on other aspects that dive more into the evolution and molecular mechanisms, we already asked ourself the simple question: How does resistance levels compare to heterotolerance levels?

We assessed heterotolerance and resistance for 2 relevant antibiotics, for 3 major pathogens (E. coli, S. aeruginosa, S. pneumoniae), for a diverse set of strains. In total, we looked at >1000 isolates that come from everywhere in world, across pathologies and throughout history)

@viblifesciences.bsky.social for sure

Apparently I was wrong, they are on this lovely platform @viblifesciences.bsky.social!

If only I could move...