Figure 1.
Illustration of biphasic killing curves of bacterial growth during antibiotic treatment. The biphasic killing curves indicate the presence of two subpopulations, consisting susceptible cells that are eliminated rapidly by antibiotic treatment according to the killing kinetics (dashed black curve) and tolerant persister cells that may survive (red curve). Termination of antibiotic treatment allows persisters to resume growth, displaying similar phenotype to the parental population (dashed purple curve).