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Many bacterial species and antibiotic classes exhibit heteroresistance, a phenomenon in which a susceptible bacterial isolate harbors a resistant subpopulation that can grow in the presence of an antibiotic and cause treatment failure. The resistant phenotype is often unstable and without antibiotic selection it reverts back to susceptibility. Here we studied the dynamics by which these resistant subpopulations are enriched in the presence of antibiotic and recede back to their baseline frequency in the absence of selection. An increasing understanding of this instability will allow more effective diagnostics and treatment of infections caused by heteroresistant bacteria. We show for clinical isolates of  Escherichia coli  and  Salmonella enterica  that different antibiotics at levels below the MIC of the susceptible main population can cause rapid enrichment of resistant subpopulations with increased copy number of genes that cause resistance. Modelling and growth rate measurements of bacteria with increased gene copy number in cultures and by microscopy of single-cells in a microfluidic chip show that the fitness cost of gene amplifications and their intrinsic instability drives their rapid loss in the absence of selection. Using a common antibiotic susceptibility test, we demonstrate that this test strongly underestimates the occurrence of heteroresistance in clinical isolates.

The highly dynamic nature of bacterial heteroresistance impairs its clinical detection