Bacterial adhesion and biofilms on surfaces

By T. Garrett, M. Bhakoo, Zhibing Zhang. 2008

1,019 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Bacterial adhesion has become a significant problem in industry and in the domicile, and much research has been done for deeper understanding of the processes involved. A generic biological model of bacterial adhesion and population growth called the bacterial biofilm growth cycle, has been described and modified many times. The biofilm growth cycle encompasses bacterial adhesion at all levels, starting with the initial physical attraction of bacteria to a substrate, and ending with the eventual liberation of cell clusters from the biofilm matrix. When describing bacterial adhesion one is simply describing one or more stages of biofilm development, neglecting the fact that the population may not reach maturity. This article provides an overview of bacterial adhesion, cites examples of how bacterial adhesion affects industry and summarises methods and instrumentation used to improve our understanding of the adhesive properties of bacteria.

Subfields: Microbiology, Molecular Biology, Organic Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/241fb06af7d2679f59a51bdc099705709ecd227f

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In Molecular Biology

1. S. Morales
2. Yuze Wang
3. Alexandre Kabla
4. Ian A. DICKIE
5. J. Banks
6. Kenichi Soga
7. J. DeJong
8. R. Smissen

Citations in the corpus

• Superhydrophilic anti-fouling electrospun cellulose acetate membranes coated with chitin nanocrystals for water filtration (2016, background): “Biofilms are understood to be mixtures of bacterial cells embedded in an extracellular polymeric matrix (EPS) made up of polysaccharides, proteins and nucleic acids [29].”
• Methods for the extraction, storage, amplification and sequencing of DNA from environmental samples (2018, background): “Such procedures inevitably bias against the extraction of DNA from more adherent organisms (e.g. biofilm dwelling bacteria may be underrepresented compared to their free-living counterparts; Garrett et al. 2008).”
• A microfluidic chip and its use in characterising the particle-scale behaviour of microbial-induced calcium carbonate precipitation (MICP) (2018, background): “In addition, it is important to note that since bacterial growth is affected by several factors such as temperature, dissolved oxygen (DO), nutrient and pH (Garrett et al., 2008), the observations in this study may not fully represent bacterial growth in real soils.”