One type of bacterial community is the biofilm where bacteria cluster together in large groups and produce a sticky, protective slime to coat them and help them stay together and to attach to surfaces. Many of the cells in a biofilm stop dividing or divide very slowly. This becomes a huge problem when trying to treat biofilms with antibiotics that tend to target actively growing cells. After a course of antibiotics, many bacteria from a biofilm will survive and begin to grow again leading to serious and recurrent infections.

I heard Professor Peter Nilsson’s talk on his nanoprobes, which are extremely sensitive optical sensors for misfolded proteins and amyloids associated with Alzheimer's Disease. It hit me that when bacteria form biofilms, they produce curli, an amyloid protein. This sparked an exciting, new study of nanoprobes as sensors for Salmonella biofilms.

Biofilms are therefore a huge problem in hospitals. They cause members of the community to become resistant and restrict treatment options to toxic or last-resort antibiotics. Many recent studies have also shown that biofilms harbor several different species of bacteria. This can lead to some dangerous alliances between pathogenic bacteria which help each other to survive and wreak havoc in unsuspecting patients.

Read the source article on Bacterial Biofilms by Ben Libberton at The Naked Scientists