Studying Antibiotic Persistence During Infection

This chapter contains the latest version of essential protocols established to study Salmonella persisters during macrophage infection . These methods, which can be applied to other pathogens, allow researchers to quantify, visualize, and characterize bacterial persisters within a population and within immune cells consistent with the recent consensus statement published by the research community working on antibiotic persistence (Balaban et al, Nat Rev Microbiol 17:441-448, 2019). These protocols notably allow the discrimination between tolerance and persistence during infection , which is essential to clarify which phenomenon is actually reported. Methods described in this chapter may contribute to the determination of key bacterial and host genes that contribute to antibiotic persistence.