Open AccessPredicting the emergence of resistance to antifungal drugs
Author(s) -
Cowen Leah E
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
fems microbiology letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.899
H-Index - 151
eISSN - 1574-6968
pISSN - 0378-1097
DOI - 10.1111/j.1574-6968.2001.tb10853.x
Subject(s) - biology , fitness landscape , context (archaeology) , genetics , genome , gene , antifungal , human evolutionary genetics , resistance (ecology) , antifungal drug , allele , drug resistance , adaptation (eye) , adaptive evolution , genetic fitness , evolutionary biology , ecology , population , microbiology and biotechnology , paleontology , demography , neuroscience , sociology , candida albicans
The emergence of antifungal drug resistance is inevitable. Here I discuss antibiotic resistance in the context of the adaptive potential of fungi and I propose an approach to predicting the evolution of antifungal resistance using experimental evolution of DNA sequences and microbial populations. Prediction is based on determination of evolutionary potential at two levels, the gene and the genome. At the level of the gene, evolutionary potential depends on the sequence space of candidate resistance genes defined by the fitness effects of all possible mutations in all possible combinations. At the level of the genome, evolutionary potential depends on the adaptive landscape defined by the fitness effects of all possible interactions among alleles constituting the genotype.