Power-law tail in lag time distribution underlies bacterial persistence

Significance Persisters are antibiotic-tolerant cells that can evade antibiotic killing by maintaining long lag phase. They complicate antibiotic treatment, leading to treatment failure. Extensive studies in the field found that a myriad of molecular mechanisms leads to persisters. However, we still do not quantitatively understand, nor can we predict, the population dynamics of persistence, e.g., how the number of persisters changes over time. To address this issue, we characterized the lag time distribution of persisters. We observed a power-law decay in the tail of the distribution. We showed that this feature can quantitatively account for the population dynamics of persistence without ad hoc parameters. Additionally, we showed how this simple quantitative feature can emerge due to complicated molecular mechanisms.