All together now: Integrating biofilm research across disciplines
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troduction The majority of bacteria in both natural and clinical settings are organized into surface-associated, integrated communities known as biofilms. Biofilms are highly structured. Cells produce a matrix of extracellular polymeric substances (EPS), which include polysaccharides, proteins, lipids, lipopolysaccharides, and other materials that serve as a scaffold holding the biofilm together. Cells embedded in this EPS matrix communicate with one another through complex signaling networks and can cooperatively restructure the biofilm through different types of cell motility and matrix remodeling. This communal form of cellular organization, which functions via social concepts, plays a number of roles. Biofilms promote genetic diversity and maintain the high cell density needed for efficient genetic exchange. Perhaps most importantly, the community provides microbes protection from many forms of environmental insult, such as predatory stress (protozoan grazing, host immune system) and chemical stress (antibiotics, chlorine-based disinfection). In fact, it is not uncommon for biofilms to be three orders of magnitude more resistant to antibiotics compared to free-swimming, planktonic bacteria (i.e., those bacteria not attached to a substratum). Biofilms contribute to a broad range of problems in human health and disease, such as tooth decay or cavities, biofouling of surgical implants and biomedical devices, and lethal chronic infections in cystic fibrosis–affected airways. Biofilms also
impinge on a variety of industrial settings. Biofouling due to biofilms increases the hydrodynamic drag on ships, leading to increased fuel consumption. They also contribute to corrosion and scaling in reactors and increase costs in oil recovery and food processing. Biofilms are not all bad. They can also be beneficial or even essential. Biofilms of bacteria that co-evolved and are accommodated to human niches are important for the establishment of the human microbiome, symbiotic microbial communities found at different sites of the human body, such as the gastrointestinal tract. Biofilms are used to digest organic contaminants in waste water treatment plants. Communities of “hydrocarbonoclastic” bacteria can help reduce petroleum from contaminated marine systems. The impact of surface-associated communities of bacteria was likely first documented in the late 1920s or early 1930s based on their impact in a practical setting—their ability to increase the hydrodynamic drag on ships.1 Subsequent studies by some of the early pioneers in biofilm research, such as Zobell and Henrici, described for the first time in the literature that bacteria could attach to and thrive on surfaces.2–5 In the late 1970s, Geesey and colleagues developed qualitative and quantitative measures for biofilm bacteria recovery in aquatic systems.6,7 Subsequent pioneering studies of biofilms (1970s and 1980s) were primarily the province of engineers and chemists.8,9 After that, microbiologists revolutionized the
Gerard C.L. Wong, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA; [email protected].
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