The highly dynamic nature of bacterial heteroresistance impairs its clinical detection

Many bacterial species and antibiotic classes exhibit heteroresistance, a phenomenon in which a susceptible bacterial isolate harbors a resistant subpopulation that can grow in the presence of an antibiotic and cause treatment failure. The resistant phenotype is often unstable and without antibiotic selection it reverts back to susceptibility. Here we studied the dynamics by which these resistant subpopulations are enriched in the presence of...