Fig. 9: Inter-community coupling may balance resistant and sensitive pathogens to prevent resistance development.
From: The effect of stochastic noise on antibiotic resistance in intestinal flora
a, b Distribution of effective antibiotic treatment cycles across 10 coupled microbial communities, for J = 0.5 (a), J = 0 (b). Here, and the orange dashed lines indicated the mean number of effective antibiotic treatments in the stochastic model. c showed a scenario where drug resistance failed to emerge after 25 complete infection-treatment-recovery cycles, depicting the quantity of resistant pathogens within each of the 10 colonies following each recovery phase. The amount of resistant pathogens were normalized to Ω. Each line represented the variation in the number of resistant pathogens within an individual community.
