PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Sarah M. Ardell
AU  - Sergey Kryazhimskiy
TI  - The Population Genetics of Collateral Resistance and Sensitivity
AID  - 10.1101/2020.08.25.267484
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.08.25.267484
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/08/22/2020.08.25.267484.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/08/22/2020.08.25.267484.full
AB  - Resistance mutations against one drug can elicit collateral sensitivity against other drugs. Multi-drug treatments exploiting such trade-offs can help slow down the evolution of resistance. However, if mutations with diverse collateral effects are available, a treated population may evolve either collateral sensitivity or collateral resistance. How to design treatments robust to such uncertainty is unclear. We show that many resistance mutations in Escherichia coli against various antibiotics indeed have diverse collateral effects. We propose to characterize such diversity with a joint distribution of fitness effects (JDFE) and develop a theory for describing and predicting collateral evolution based on simple statistics of the JDFE. We show how to robustly rank drug pairs to minimize the risk of collateral resistance and how to estimate JDFEs. In addition to practical applications, these results have implications for our understanding of evolution in variable environments.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.