Biofilms are microbial communities that form on surfaces and are implicated in a wide variety of intractable medical and industrial problems. To form a biofilm, individual microbes must first adhere to a surface using extracellular polymers and appendages. Knowledge of the forces associated with microbial adhesion is critical for understanding biofilm formation; however, the forces required to remove individual microbes from a surface are broadly distributed, ranging from 1 pN to 103 pN. Thus, methods are needed for performing large numbers of adhesion force measurements in parallel with instrumentation that is capable of spanning orders of magnitude in force. The centrifuge force microscope (CFM), consisting of a microscope and camera contained within a centrifuge, was originally developed for performing hundreds of single molecule force measurements simultaneously over a wide force range (10-3 pN – 104 pN). Here we present the use of the CFM to investigate the adhesion forces associated with microbial attachment and identify the attachment strength of extracellular structures using gene knockouts of Bacillus subtilis and Pseudomonas aeruginosa biofilms. This experimental approach may provide insight into the early stages of biofilm formation and lead to new approaches in biofilm prevention.

Characterizing microbial adhesion strength with centrifuge force microscopy

254th National Meeting (2017)

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