Formation of biofilm in undesirable region could be critical as biofilm can diminish the efficiency of various devices in the industrial field and cause secondary infections in medical devices. For this reason, development of biofilm and different antimicrobial approaches have been an active area of research, but most efforts remained in studies with conventional experimental system such as dishes or wells. Recently, the advances of microfluidic system allowed a new platform for such research with advantages including precise control mechanical and chemical factors and possibility of mimicking physiologically relevant bacterial microenvironment. Furthermore, microfluidics enabled analysis on various characteristics of biofilm such as development of biofilms in microfluidic chips with complex tube shapes, and the formation of biofilms under various flow conditions. However, there is still limited understanding on the mechanisms of different antimicrobial materials and there is a need for studying the effects of antimicrobial materials in biologically relevant platform. Among various approaches, graphene materials have been extensively researched as a possible antimicrobial material. In this study, we tried to combine graphene material with microfluidic chip. First, by controlling the flow in microfluidic channel with bacteria, we were able to form biofilm and bio-streamer. We used Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which is notorious for the secondary infections. Then, by coating graphene, the antimicrobial activity depending on the concentration was quantified using live/dead fluorescence staining of bacteria. As a result, it was found that we can mimic various biofilm microenvironment and control the formation biofilm using antimicrobial materials in a microfluidic system.

Formation of biofilm microenvironment in microfluidic system for investigating antimicrobial materials

256th National Meeting (2018)

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