1887

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Volume 60, Issue 6

Role of persister cells in chronic infections: clinical relevance and perspectives on anti-persister therapies Open Access

Abstract

Certain infectious diseases caused by pathogenic bacteria are typically chronic in nature. Potentially deadly examples include tuberculosis, caused by , cystic fibrosis-associated lung infections, primarily caused by , and candidiasis, caused by the fungal pathogen . A hallmark of this type of illness is the recalcitrance to treatment with antibiotics, even in the face of laboratory tests showing the causative agents to be sensitive to drugs. Recent studies have attributed this treatment failure to the presence of a small, transiently multidrug-tolerant subpopulation of cells, so-called persister cells. Here, we review our current understanding of the role that persisters play in the treatment and outcome of chronic infections. In a second part, we offer a perspective on the development of anti-persister therapies based on genes and mechanisms that have been implicated in persistence over the last decade.

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© 2011 SGM
  • This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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2011-06-01
2024-04-18
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Role of persister cells in chronic infections: clinical relevance and perspectives on anti-persister therapies
J. Med. Microbiol. 60, 699 (2011); https://doi.org/10.1099/jmm.0.030932-0
/content/journal/jmm/10.1099/jmm.0.030932-0
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