The work of Witold Postek, Klaudia Staśkiewicz, Elin Lilja, and Bartlomiej Waclaw scheds new light on how the physical structure of surfaces influences the growth and evolution of bacterial biofilms.
We show that corrugated surfaces inhibit the spread of new genetic variants in biofilms. In particular, antibiotic resistant mutants that occur in biofilms growing on corrugated surfaces form only small local populations when exposed to sub-lethal concentrations of antibiotics. This is in contrast to biofilms on flat surfaces on which such resistant variants spread quickly and take over the entire biofilm.
This limited spreading is achieved by using the physics of the growing biofilm against it: corrugations redirect the “biomass flow” in the biofilm, which limits the invasive potential of clonal “sectors” to invade nearby sectors.
We hope that this research will help design surfaces that enable a better control of the evolution of bacterial communities, and find applications in medicine and industry.
Dioscuri Centre for Physics and Chemistry of Bacteria 