People with cystic fibrosis (pwCF) often suffer from chronic lung infections with Pseudomonas aeruginosa. While antibiotics are still commonly used to treat P. aeruginosa infections, there is a high discordance between in vitro and in vivo antibiotic efficacy, which contributes to suboptimal antibiotic therapy. In the present study, we found that isolates from the same sputum sample had highly diverse antibiotic resistance profiles [based on the minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC)], which may explain the reported discrepancy between in vitro and in vivo antibiotic efficacy. Through systematic analysis, we report that pooling nine isolates per sputum sample significantly decreased intrasample diversity in MIC and influenced clinical interpretation of antibiotic susceptibility tests compared to single isolate testing. Hence, pooling of isolates may offer a solution to obtain a consistent MIC test result and could lead to optimizing antibiotic therapy in pwCF and other infectious diseases where diversity in antibiotic resistance is observed.
Keywords: Pseudomonas aeruginosa; antibiotic susceptibility testing; cystic fibrosis; diversity; minimal inhibitory concentration; pooling isolates.