Bacterial Adaptation Strategies to the Host: From Acute, Aggressive to Chronic, Dormant Infections 2.0

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue is a continuation of our previous Special Issue “Bacterial Adaptation Strategies to the Host: From Acute, Aggressive to Chronic, Dormant Infections”.

Host-pathogen interaction is highly dynamic and can turn in aggressive, tissue destructive diseases or only harmless colonization. In this interaction, the microbes employ several strategies to attack the host and establish an infection and at the same time to survive within hosts and enable their long term survival. The microbial flexibility to be adapted to several environments is directly linked to bacterial fitness. To establish an infection microbes produce a lot of virulence factors to damage host cells, to enter deep tissue structures and get nutrients for their growth. However, this aggressive microbial behaviour awake the immune host response which try to eliminate the microbial population. During the infection process, the microbes can switch to a dormant or metabolically less-active phenotypes to enhance their survival. Thus, the chronic phase of infection is defined as an intrinsic relationship between microbes and host where the microbe have a niche to be hidden from antimicrobials and immune response.

Bacteria turn to dormant or sleeping bacterial phenotypes when the nutrients are limited and allow them to save energy in this hostile environment. Sleeping bacterial phenotypes represent a big challenge to physicians because they are tolerant to several antimicrobials that require actively dividing bacterial cells. Furthermore, dormant bacteria can turn to active and aggressive phenotype when new nutrient sources are available, representing a potential risk for developing a new infection.

This switch from aggressive to dormant bacterial phenotype depends on the expression of virulence factors driven by a fine regulatory network and plays an important role in the progress of infection from acute to chronic phase.

This special issue is dedicated to understand the mechanisms that enable bacteria to turn from aggressive to dormant phenotypes that influence the outcome of the infection. Reviews and research articles focusing on understanding the interchange between active/aggressive to chronic dormant bacterial phenotype by multiple approaches that include molecular and cell biology tools, advanced imaging tools and -omics techniques are welcome.

Prof. Dr. Bettina Löffler
Dr. Lorena Tuchscherr
Guest Editors

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• dormancy
• phenotype switching
• bacterial stress
• survival strategies
• persisters
• resuscitation
• starvation
• cell cycle arrest
• ATP homeostasis

• Bacterial Adaptation Strategies to the Host: From Acute, Aggressive to Chronic, Dormant Infections in International Journal of Molecular Sciences (8 articles)