GMP-Cor: Quantifying Transcriptional Dysregulation in Antibiotic Tolerance and Persistence

Disrupted growth-arrest states in stressed bacteria show significantly reduced gene–gene correlations versus regulated cells, linking tolerance-enhanced persistence to global transcriptional dysregulation.

• Why it matters: Stress can overwhelm normal growth-arrest programs, producing a disrupted arrest with broad lag-time distributions that underlie antibiotic persistence during recovery.
• What they did: The study uses single-cell RNA-seq on bacteria in disrupted conditions, developing GMP-Cor to quantify dysregulation and analyze gene–gene correlation patterns in sparse data.
• The result: GMP-Cor reveals globally reduced gene–gene correlations in disrupted cells and can also separate proliferating from drug-arrested persistent cancer cells.

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