Data from: Temporal variation in antibiotic environments slows down resistance evolution in pathogenic Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Antibiotic resistance is a growing concern to public health. New treatment
strategies may alleviate the situation by slowing down the evolution of
resistance. Here, we evaluated sequential treatment protocols using two
fully independent laboratory-controlled evolution experiments with the
human pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa PA14 and two pairs of clinically
relevant antibiotics (doripenem/ciprofloxacin and cefsulodin/gentamicin).
Our results consistently show that the sequential application of two
antibiotics decelerates resistance evolution relative to monotherapy.
Sequential treatment enhanced population extinction although we applied
antibiotics at sub-lethal dosage. In both experiments, we identified an
order-effect of the antibiotics used in the sequential protocol, leading
to significant variation in the long-term efficacy of the tested
protocols. These variations appear to be caused by asymmetric evolutionary
constraints, whereby adaptation to one drug slowed down adaptation to the
other drug, but not vice versa. An understanding of such asymmetric
constraints may help future development of evolutionary robust treatments
against infectious disease.