persisters

The really interesting thing is that persisters and non-persisters are genetically identical, and it's thought that maintaining some level of persisters in population is a bet-hedging strategy of the population.

And again, with a mean followup time of over 10 years, most of the people who transitioned 5-15 years later would be counted as persisters, not desisters.

These protective persisters form when the bacteria are threatened with defensive immune system biochemicals or antibiotics.

Many researchers believe that doxycyline's inability to clear the persisters may account for the ongoing symptoms of some Lyme sufferers.

There is no doubt about it anymore that Lyme persisters are real or that standard two weeks of antibiotics can't eradicate it all.

Lyme persisters can only be killed by a combination of antibiotics.[1] Like tuberculosis.

All the individual persisters can then have their own tests that guarantee they adhere to to Persister interface and do their own individual things correctly.

> with a mean followup time of over 10 years, most of the people who transitioned 5-15 years later would be counted as persisters, not desisters.

The latest research is about how to kill those persisters.

Azlocillin also appears to kill drug-tolerant persisters very effectively.

> Many researchers believe that doxycyline's inability to clear the persisters may account for the ongoing symptoms of some Lyme sufferers.

Across all studies, the percentage of persisters was 17.4% (total N = 235), with a range from 0 to 29.1%.3 Are all these other studies finding low rates of persistence also tainted in some way?

The main point here is that your application code is coded to one API/interface - the "persister" - and you can easily swap in different persisters for different reasons.

Re: #1 I think you missed the caption on the black and green picture: > This image shows how the Lyme bacteria, Borrelia burgdorferi, form protective round body "persisters" when threatened by defensive immune system biochemicals in blood serum.

To me, this is an interesting result for three reasons: 1) it appears to be effective against three main forms of the Borrelia spirochete: the normal corkscrew shape, the round-body cyst, and biofilm (they don't call it by that name, but say "drug-tolerant persisters" whose meaning I'm inferring from rest of the literature).

Persisters make up a very small percentage of the total population but can end up re-seeding the entire population after antibiotic treatment.