Collateral sensitivity of antibiotic-resistant microbes

Understanding how evolution of microbial resistance towards a given antibiotic influences susceptibility to other drugs is a challenge of profound importance. By combining laboratory evolution, genome sequencing, and functional analyses, recent works have charted the map of evolutionary trade-offs between antibiotics and have explored the underlying molecular mechanisms. Strikingly, mutations that caused multidrug resistance in bacteria simultaneously enhanced sensitivity to many other unrelated drugs (collateral sensitivity). Here, we explore how this emerging research sheds new light on resistance mechanisms and the way it could be exploited for the development of alternative antimicrobial strategies.