Acute Sensitivity of V. cholerae to Phosphate Starvation: A Possible Case of Futile Metabolism.

Multi-nutrient starvation profiles are emerging as an essential feature of human pathogen studies. In the present work, we attempted to understand why V. cholerae cannot survive in the growth media that includes carbon and nitrogen but lacks phosphate.

Glucose sensitizes the stationary and persistent population of Vibrio cholerae to ciprofloxacin.

The subject of analysis in this report was the antibiotic susceptibility of V. cholerae under glucose supplementation since the metabolites can significantly alter the antibiotic sensitivity of bacteria. Glucose could change the antibiotic susceptibility in a growth phase-dependent manner, however, the antibiotic susceptibility of exponentially growing cells was not affected in the presence of glucose.

Inhibition of protein synthesis eradicates persister cells of .

In the present work, we studied the antibiotic-induced persister formation in . Persisters vary with the bacterial growth phase with minimum persisters in log phase and maximum in stationary phase. Only 10% of the stationary phase cells of were tolerant of ampicillin and ciprofloxacin.

Comparison of Starvation-Induced Persister Cells with Antibiotic-Induced Persister Cells.

The phenotypic heterogeneity in a large population arises because of fluctuation in microenvironments and stochastic gene expressions. In this report, we isolated two types of persistent sub-populations of Vibrio cholerae, one triggered by starvation and another by antibiotics. We characterised starvation-induced (E-cells) and antibiotic-induced (P-cell) persister cells for stress tolerance, colony morphology and toxin gene expressions.

The ploidy of Vibrio cholerae is variable and is influenced by growth phase and nutrient levels.

The ploidy of Vibrio cholerae was quantified under different growth conditions. The V. cholerae was found to be (mero-) oligoploid or polyploid.