Related topics: bacteria

Bacterial lifestyle alters the evolution of antibiotic resistance

How bacteria live—whether as independent cells or in a communal biofilm—determines how they evolve antibiotic resistance, which could lead to more personalized approaches to antimicrobial therapy and infection control.

Just how resilient are biofilms?

Biofilms hold promise for generating electricity and removing contamination from groundwater, but they also threaten many industrial processes and human health. As the environment changes in which these biofilms thrive, it ...

How flow shapes bacterial biofilms

EPFL biophysicists have taken a systematic look into how bacterial biofilms are affected by fluid flow. The findings can give us clues about the physical rules guiding biofilm architecture, but also about the social dynamics ...

How bacterial communities transport nutrients

Under threat of being scrubbed away with disinfectant, individual bacteria can improve their odds of survival by joining together to form colonies, called biofilms. What Arnold Mathijssen, postdoctoral fellow in bioengineering ...

Researchers find a way to peel slimy biofilms like old stickers

Slimy, hard-to-clean bacterial mats called biofilms cause problems ranging from medical infections to clogged drains and fouled industrial equipment. Now, researchers at Princeton have found a way to cleanly and completely ...

How antibiotics spread resistance

Bacteria can become insensitive to antibiotics by picking up resistance genes from the environment. Unfortunately for patients, the stress response induced by antibiotics activates competence in microorganisms, the ability ...

Researchers discover what pneumococcus says to make you sick

Carnegie Mellon University researchers have identified a molecule that plays a key role in bacterial communication and infection. Their findings add a new word to pneumococcus' molecular dictionary and may lead to novel ways ...

Researchers discover how fatal biofilms form

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 ...

Dental plaque is no match for catalytic nanoparticles

Combine a diet high in sugar with poor oral hygiene habits and dental cavities, or caries, will likely result. The sugar triggers the formation of an acidic biofilm, known as plaque, on the teeth, eroding the surface. Early ...

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