AUTHOR=Boldrin Francesca , Provvedi Roberta , Cioetto Mazzabò Laura , Segafreddo Greta , Manganelli Riccardo 

TITLE=Tolerance and Persistence to Drugs: A Main Challenge in the Fight Against Mycobacterium tuberculosis

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Microbiology

VOLUME=Volume 11 - 2020

YEAR=2020

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/microbiology/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2020.01924

DOI=10.3389/fmicb.2020.01924

ISSN=1664-302X

ABSTRACT=The treatment of tuberculosis is extremely long. One of the reasons why M. tuberculosis elimination from the organism takes so long, is that in particular environmental conditions it can become tolerant to drugs and/or develop persisters able to survive killing even from very high drug concentrations. Tolerance develops in response to a harsh environment exposure encountered by bacteria during infection, mainly due to the action of the immune system, whereas persistence results from the presence of heterogeneous bacterial populations with different degrees of drug sensitivity, and can be modulated by exposure to stress conditions. Here we review the actual knowledge on the stress response mechanisms enacted by M. tuberculosis during infection, which lead to increased drug tolerance or development of a highly drug-resistant subpopulation.