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0:00
Welcome, everybody.
My name is Prof. Mark Webber.
I am based at the
Quadram Institute
and the University
of East Anglia,
in Norwich, in the UK.
Today, I'm going to give an
introduction into biofilms.
We're going to talk a little
bit about what biofilms are
and some of the good
things about them,
but also, some of
the bad things.
The title of this session is
Biofilms: The Good,
the Bad, and the Ugly.
0:24
This is just an overview
of what we're going
to talk about today.
We're going to give a
little introduction
to what biofilms
are, why we care.
Then secondly, we're going to do
a little bit of an introduction
into how biofilms form
in the biofilm life cycle.
Then we're going to explain
how biofilms can be a problem,
so how biofilms can
cause infections
and how they're very
antimicrobial-resistant,
a little bit of the key features
that allow them to cause
these problematic
impacts on human health.
Finally, we're going to
talk a little bit about
how biofilms can
be used for good.
One thing, just to
say throughout this,
is that the details of what
I'm going to talk about
are really varying between
different conditions,
and biofilms can be
very, very different
when they're grown
in different ways,
but we're going to talk about
some of the main generalities.
The first section we're
going to talk about is,
what are biofilms
and why do we care?
1:18
This shows a
conventional picture
of some microbes floating
around in a piece of liquid,
some bacteria swimming around.
This is maybe how bacteria
were first observed
and discovered when people
were looking in liquids
and rainwater and things
and found that these
microbes were present.
A lot of the study of microbes
is concentrated on
growing them in liquid
because it's very easy to grow
large populations of bacteria.
However, in reality,
many bacteria in the real world
look much more like this.
Comparing the free-floating
bacteria on the left,
if we now look at the right
hand side of this slide,
you can see that
bacteria in a biofilm
are very, very closely
packed together.
You can see here
individual cells,
but they're surrounded,
a matrix of material
that they produce.
This extra matrix,
which we'll talk about in
much more detail later,
is going to be composed of lots
and lots of different substrates.
But this means that the
bacteria are cemented together
in this very tightly
knit community.
This is what most bacteria
in the real world
really look like.
They will actually grow
together in a biofilm,
where you have high
densities of cells
sitting on top of each other,
produced in this matrix.
This is very different from
the picture on the left,
where you have some
free-floating bacteria
swimming around on their own.
