Rodríguez Marcos, Cantallops Irene, Domingo-Calap Pilar, Sardanyés Josep
Institute for Integrative Systems Biology (I2SysBio). C. Catedràtic Agustín Escardino Benlloch, 46980 Paterna, València, Spain.
Centre de Recerca Matemàtica (CRM). Edifici C. Campus de Bellaterra, Cerdanyola del Vallès 08193, Barcelona, Spain.
MicroPubl Biol. 2025 May 30;2025. doi: 10.17912/micropub.biology.001666. eCollection 2025.
In the quantitative description of evolving phage-bacterial systems, a central challenge lies in accurately identifying the key parameters governing the dynamics of both bacterial and phage populations. This is especially relevant in the case of multidrug-resistant pathogenic bacteria such as . This pathogen poses serious health problems due to antibiotic overuse, which causes the emergence of antibiotic-resistant strains and great difficulty in eradicating bacterial infections with antibiotics. Research on phage-bacteria thus becomes a very important topic to provide alternative strategies to eradicate multidrug-resistant bacteria, and thus quantitative descriptions of these processes are of paramount importance. Despite increasing research on this topic, key structural parameters of the populations, such as bacterial growth rates, the impact of phages on bacterial dynamics or the probability of emergence of phage-resistant strains, are often scarce. In this study, we investigated a battery of growth experiments for alone and with the presence of bacteriophage vB_Kpn_2-P4. Using mathematical models we estimate key parameters for these experiments, showing the rapid growth and emergence of phage-resistant mutants which outcompete the susceptible bacteria strains. Our results provide quantitative estimates of these processes and may be useful for understanding phage-bacterial dynamical systems and parameterizing future theoretical and computational models.
在对不断演变的噬菌体 - 细菌系统进行定量描述时，一个核心挑战在于准确识别控制细菌和噬菌体种群动态的关键参数。这在诸如多重耐药病原菌的情况下尤为重要。由于抗生素的过度使用，这种病原菌引发了严重的健康问题，导致抗生素耐药菌株的出现以及使用抗生素根除细菌感染的巨大困难。因此，噬菌体 - 细菌研究成为提供根除多重耐药细菌替代策略的一个非常重要的课题，对这些过程的定量描述至关重要。尽管对该课题的研究不断增加，但种群的关键结构参数，如细菌生长速率、噬菌体对细菌动态的影响或噬菌体抗性菌株出现的概率，往往稀缺。在本研究中，我们针对单独的以及存在噬菌体vB_Kpn_2 - P4的情况进行了一系列生长实验。我们使用数学模型估算这些实验的关键参数，结果表明噬菌体抗性突变体迅速生长并胜过敏感细菌菌株。我们的结果提供了对这些过程的定量估计，可能有助于理解噬菌体 - 细菌动态系统并为未来的理论和计算模型设定参数。
