Matthew F. Kaleta, Olga E. Petrova, Claudia Zampaloni, Fernando Garcia-Alcalde, Matthew Parker & Karin Sauer
Bacteria preferentially grow as biofilm communities in diverse settings including the natural environment, industrial systems, and the medical sphere1,2,3. Growth within biofilms offers protection from adverse conditions, such as defense from protozoan grazing in the marine environments, resistance to antimicrobial agents during decontamination of industrial and medical equipment, and evasion of host immune responses during infections. Evidence of this protected mode of growth appears early in the fossil record (~3.25 billion years ago) and is common throughout a diverse range of organisms in both the Archaea and Bacteria lineages, suggesting biofilm growth to be an integral component of the prokaryotic life cycle8. Indeed, studies of biofilms formed by diverse prokaryotes have revealed common trends and phenotypic characteristics of biofilms, as addressed by several reviews. These common trends include cell-to-cell communication or quorum sensing (QS), the production of extracellular polymeric substances to form a protective matrix, the presence of eDNA … read more