The clinical impact of bacterial biofilms
By Niels Høiby, O. Ciofu, H. Johansen, Zhi-jun Song, C. Moser, P. Ø. Jensen, Søren Molin, M. Givskov, T. Tolker-Nielsen, T. Bjarnsholt. International Journal of Oral Science, 2011
799 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Bacteria survive in nature by forming biofilms on surfaces and probably most, if not all, bacteria (and fungi) are capable of forming biofilms. A biofilm is a structured consortium of bacteria embedded in a self‐produced polymer matrix consisting of polysaccharide, protein and extracellular DNA. Bacterial biofilms are resistant to antibiotics, disinfectant chemicals and to phagocytosis and other components of the innate and adaptive inflammatory defense system of the body. It is known, for example, that persistence of staphylococcal infections related to foreign bodies is due to biofilm formation. Likewise, chronic Pseudomonas aeruginosa lung infections in cystic fibrosis patients are caused by biofilm growing mucoid strains. Gradients of nutrients and oxygen exist from the top to the bottom of biofilms and the bacterial cells located in nutrient poor areas have decreased metabolic activity and increased doubling times. These more or less dormant cells are therefore responsible for some of the tolerance to antibiotics. Biofilm growth is associated with an increased level of mutations. Bacteria in biofilms communicate by means of molecules, which activates certain genes responsible for production of virulence factors and, to some extent, biofilm structure. This phenomenon is called quorum sensing and depends upon the concentration of the quorum sensing molecules in a certain niche, which depends on the number of the bacteria. Biofilms can be prevented by antibiotic prophylaxis or early aggressive antibiotic therapy and they can be treated by chronic suppressive antibiotic therapy. Promising strategies may include the use of compounds which can dissolve the biofilm matrix and quorum sensing inhibitors, which increases biofilm susceptibility to antibiotics and phagocytosis.
Subfields: Critical Care and Intensive Care Medicine, Molecular Biology, Periodontics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1052ab7e2181178e35222ea9a50763a79bb99d0f
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Citations in the corpus
- Bacterial biofilm development as a multicellular adaptation: antibiotic resistance and new therapeutic strategies. (2013, background): “It is estimated that the majority of all medical infections are caused by bacterial biofilms that colonize either nonbiological or biological surfaces [2,13 ,14] (Table 1).”
- Nano-Strategies to Fight Multidrug Resistant Bacteria—“A Battle of the Titans” (2018, background): “This way, bacterial biofilms pose a significant challenge to the efficacy of conventional antibiotics being considered an essential platform for antibiotic resistance (Høiby et al., 2011).”