EDITORIAL article
Front. Cell. Infect. Microbiol.
Sec. Antibiotic Resistance and New Antimicrobial drugs
This article is part of the Research TopicBacterial Population Heterogeneity, Stress Response and Antibiotic ToleranceView all 7 articles
Editorial: Bacterial Population Heterogeneity, Stress Response and Antibiotic Tolerance
Provisionally accepted
- 1Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India
- 2Chanakya University, Bengaluru, India
- 3Universita di Pavia, Pavia, Italy
- 4Texas A and M University, College Station, United States
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The emergence of antibiotic resistance is a critical challenge for infectious disease control and global health, resulting in treatment failure and increased mortality (Abbas et. al., 2024).Multiple independent and synergistic mechanisms enable bacteria to survive antibiotic treatment, relapse, and evolve resistance (Sulaiman and Lam 2022, Datta et. al., 2024). Intrinsic factors-such as population heterogeneity that generates persistent or tolerant subpopulations, and stress responses that promote genetic variation-play a central role in the development and stepwise progression of antibiotic tolerance towards resistance (Brauner et al., 2016;Levin-Reisman et al., 2017;Balaban et al., 2019). While traditional diagnostic and therapeutic approaches focus on resistance detection (WHO, 2025), there is growing emphasis on understanding molecular mechanisms underlying bacterial stress response and tolerance (Nandakumar et. al., 2014;Vijay et. al., 2024), and employing novel antibiotic combinations and potentiators to improve outcomes (Ilchenko et. al., 2024).In the research topic, a comprehensive review by Alikhani et al.
Keywords: antibiotic resistance, antibiotic tolerance, pharmacokinetics, Pharmacodynamics, Heteroresistance, Bio-films, Carbapenem resistance
Received: 25 Nov 2025; Accepted: 05 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Subramanian, Kurthkoti, Mattioni Marchetti and Srinivasan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Vijay Srinivasan
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