<div>Antibiotic resistance is a global health threat. To combat against
infections, we urgently need better strategies. Currently there are
limited number of antibiotics in the treatment repertoire of existing
bacterial infections. Among them rifampicin is a broad-spectrum
antibiotic against various bacterial pathogens. Efficacy of rifampicin
decreases by time due to appearance of rifampicin persister or resistant
phenotypes in the population. To benefit more from rifampicin, its
current standard dosage might be reconsidered and deeply explored using
both computational tools and experimental or clinical studies. In this
study, we present the mathematical relationship between the
concentration of rifampicin and the growth and killing kinetics of
<i>Escherichia coli</i> cells. We generated time-killing curves of
<i>Escherichia coli</i> cells in the presence of 4 µg/ml, 16 µg/ml, and
32 µg/ml rifampicin exposures. We fitted time-killing curve data using
the <i>lsqcurvefit</i> function in MATLAB to model rifampicin responses
of <i>Escherichia coli</i> cells.</div>