Physics and Astronomy, University of Southampton, Southampton, Hampshire, United Kingdom.
Health Sciences, University of Southampton, Southampton, Hampshire, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2022 Apr 11;17(4):e0261482. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0261482. eCollection 2022.
Filamentous molecules tend to spontaneously assemble into liquid crystalline droplets with a tactoid morphology in environments with high concentration on non-adsorbing molecules. Tactoids of filamentous Pf bacteriophage, such as those produced by Pseudomonas aeruginosa, have been linked to increased antibiotic tolerance. We modelled this system and show that tactoids composed of filamentous Pf virions can lead to antibiotic tolerance by acting as an adsorptive diffusion barrier. The continuum model, reminiscent of descriptions of reactive diffusion in porous media, has been solved numerically and good agreement was found with the analytical results, obtained using a homogenisation approach. We find that the formation of tactoids significantly increases antibiotic diffusion times which may lead to stronger antibiotic resistance.
丝状分子在高浓度非吸附分子的环境中，往往会自发组装成具有向列型形态的液晶液滴。在铜绿假单胞菌等产生的丝状 Pf 噬菌体的原纤维中，已发现与抗生素耐药性增加有关。我们对该系统进行了建模，结果表明，丝状 Pf 病毒粒子组成的原纤维可以通过充当吸附扩散屏障来导致抗生素耐药性。该连续体模型让人联想到多孔介质中反应扩散的描述，已通过数值方法进行了解决，并与使用均匀化方法获得的解析结果吻合良好。我们发现，原纤维的形成显著增加了抗生素的扩散时间，这可能导致更强的抗生素耐药性。
