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posted by CoolHand on Monday October 08 2018, @02:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the film-at-11 dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

By severely curtailing the effects of antibiotics, the formation of organized communities of bacterial cells known as biofilms can be deadly during surgeries and in urinary tract infections. Yale researchers have just come a lot closer to understanding how these biofilms develop, and potentially how to stop them.

[...] Fighting biofilms has been particularly difficult because it hasn't been well understood how bacteria cells make the transition from behaving individually to existing in collective structures. However, the researchers in the Levchenko lab, working with colleagues at the University of California-San Diego, recently found a key mechanism for biofilm formation that also provides a way to study this process in a controlled and reproducible way.

The investigators designed and built microfluidic devices and novel gels that housed uropathogenic E. coli cells, which are often the cause of urinary tract infections. These devices mimicked the environment inside human cells that host the invading bacteria during infections. The scientists found that the bacterial colonies would grow to the point where they would be squeezed by either the walls of the chamber, the fibers, or the gel. This self-generated stress was itself a trigger of the biofilm formation.

"This was very surprising, but we saw all the things you would expect from a biofilm," said Levchenko, the John C. Malone Professor of Biomedical Engineering and director of the Yale Systems Biology Institute. "The cells produced the biofilm components and suddenly became very antibiotic-resistant. And all of that was accompanied by an indication that the cells were under biological stress and the stress was coming from this mechanical interaction with the environment."

[...] With this discovery, Levchenko said, researchers can use various devices that mimic other cellular environments and explore biofilm formation under countless environments and circumstances. They can also use the devices introduced in this study to produce biofilms rapidly, precisely, and in high numbers in a simple, inexpensive, and reproducible way. This would allow screening drugs that could potentially breach the protective layer of the biofilms and break it down.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08 2018, @06:10PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08 2018, @06:10PM (#746049)

    Shouldn't this be the specialty of dental profession? Guess dental research just doesn't go that deep (i.e., basic, fundamental research)?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08 2018, @09:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08 2018, @09:23PM (#746141)

    Dental research is focused on how to maximally extract money from patient's wallets, not how to reduce dental disease. If you could take a piil to do away with plaque, dentists would become about as useful to society as Gender Study PhDs.