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0:00
This
is Dr. Randy Wolcott,
and this presentation will be
on biofilm-based wound care.
Let's get started.
0:10
Those are our objectives,
the main objective
being that there's two ways by
which bacteria cause infection.
I do have a conflict
of interest as being
a part owner of
PathoGenius Laboratory.
It's a laboratory that uses
DNA to identify microbes.
And let me just brag about
PathoGenius for a second.
When NASA wanted to make sure there
was no microbial DNA on Curiosity,
they turned to our laboratory.
And that's really cool, and that
gives us a lot of credibility.
But we started asking
ourselves, why would
they care if there's
microbes on Curiosity?
Well, then we understood
that the Martians
really don't like bacteria.
Well, this is to
point out that we're
going to stick with hard science.
And when I make my
reaches and conjectures,
I'll be sure to identify that.
1:00
The first thing we have to
understand is what a biofilm is.
Bill Costerton coined this term in
the late '70s, when he was seeing
slime on a rock in
the alpine streams.
This slime that's on this
piece of wood is microbes.
It's the self-secreted
goo of the microbes.
But it's also sand and grit and
the wood that it's attached to.
So all of that would be
called biofilm in nature.
1:30
This is an overview of
the life cycle of biofilm.
What Peg Dirckx is illustrating
here are the four basic components
of biofilm, which is attachment,
microcolony formation, quorum
sensing to form a mature
colony, and then reproduction.
So individual bacteria, planktonic
bacteria, find a surface,
they attach.
Once there's a quorum
or a sufficient number
of these bacteria, a structure,
a three-dimensional structure,
rises up off the surface and forms
the channels and the architecture
that we call mature biofilm.
Reproductively, 70% comes
off as detachment fragments,
and 30% come off as seeds.
So the detachment fragments
have all the colony
defenses of the mature biofilm.
And then the seeds are the
planktonic or individual
free-floating bacteria
that we understand
as bacteria on a Petri dish.
