Biofilms

Abstract

BACTERIAL BIOFILMS have recently risen to prominence in the scientific and medical literature in large part because of the dramatic increase in antibiotic-resistant infections in hospital settings. Yet biofilms have been around for 3.25 billion years, emerging at the same time as multicellular organisms like filamentous prokaryotes and cyanobacterial mats (de la Fuente-Núñez et al. 2013). Experimental observations of biofilms also date back a considerable time as well, though far less than 3.25 billion years. The material Leeuwenhoek famously scraped off his teeth and examined under a microscope in one of his studies of “animalcules” was none other than a biofilm. J. B. Burton-Sanderson noted in 1870, in the 13th Report of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council, that he had observed rods at the surface of a liquid that “adhere together by their sides after the manner of the elements of a columnar epithelium”. He noted, however, that there was “strong reason to believe that this adhesion is not direct, that is, that they are not in actual contact but glued together by a viscous intermediary substance.” (Vlamakis et al. 2013). This substance is now known to be an extracellular matrix, composed of a variety of molecular components, which can be assembled – and disassembled – by bacteria depending on the stress conditions they experience.