Malthusian parameters as estimators of the fitness of microbes: A cautionary tale about the low side of high throughput

Jeniffer Concepción-Acevedo, Howard N. Weiss, Waqas Nasir Chaudhry, Bruce R. Levin

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

25 Scopus citations

Abstract

The maximum exponential growth rate, the Malthusian parameter (MP), is commonly used as a measure of fitness in experimental studies of adaptive evolution and of the effects of antibiotic resistance and other genes on the fitness of planktonic microbes. Thanks to automated, multi-well optical density plate readers and computers, with little hands-on effort investigators can readily obtain hundreds of estimates of MPs in less than a day. Here we compare estimates of the relative fitness of antibiotic susceptible and resistant strains of E. coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus based on MP data obtained with automated multi-well plate readers with the results from pairwise competition experiments. This leads us to question the reliability of estimates of MP obtained with these high throughput devices and the utility of these estimates of the maximum growth rates to detect fitness differences.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article numbere0126915
JournalPloS one
Volume10
Issue number6
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 26 2015

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
  • General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
  • General

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