![]() ![]() “Biofilms will grow and be very sturdy, sometimes in places that we don’t want them, whether that’s in patients with disease that are immunocompromised, or in water treatment plants, or on the hulls of ships. “We’re motivated to study them because they intersect with the human world,” says Asp. “Bacterial organisms, by biomass, are the most predominant life form on the earth,” says Patteson, acknowledging this overlap in interest with Welch, from whose lab they procured the strains of bacteria. We don’t exactly know why in the case of the biofilms, but it makes sense that they’re able to exert more force and move faster.” “It makes sense, in a way,” says Patteson, “if you tried to climb a sticky wall instead of a slippery wall, you could exert more force on it. Indeed, by mapping the stress, the team was able to show how biofilms exert more pressure on a stiff surface than on a softer one. Unlike with the less controllable agar, Patteson’s team can now make calculations to measure the forces that the biofilms are putting on the gels. colis pivotal role in the history of biology, from the discovery of DNA to the latest advances in biotechnology.He reveals the many surprising and alarming parallels between E. “We study mechanics and soft matter systems, so we have equations that describe how something deforms under certain amounts of stress,” says Patteson. A Best Book of the YearSeed Magazine Granta Magazine The Plain-DealerIn this fascinating and utterly engaging book, Carl Zimmer traces E. To the right, a mathematical model of an elastic solid is used to calculate the stress exerted by the bacteria.īesides design and manipulation of the gels, Patteson and Asp apply physics to biology in the ways that they process the images, measure the boundaries of the biofilms, and calculate how quickly the boundaries expand. He reveals the many surprising and alarming parallels between E. colis pivotal role in the history of biology, from the discovery of DNA to the latest advances in biotechnology. The left image depicts how each small part of the hydrogel moved based on the movement of embedded fluorescent beads. A Best Book of the YearSeed Magazine Granta Magazine The Plain-DealerIn this fascinating and utterly engaging book, Carl Zimmer traces E. “Are they sensing the solid part or the fluid part?” she says. “We call it a complex material because it is a solid but has properties like a fluid.” This mixture of properties, she explains, means that teasing out exactly which aspects make the bacteria behave a certain way more difficult. “It’s a substance popular in culinary applications because it makes things gelatinous and adds texture,” says Patteson. In the past, scientists investigating this question typically grew the colonies on gels made from agar, an extract of red algae. Patteson and her team wanted to investigate what makes a biofilm-or a colony of microorganisms that bond together-grow and flourish on some kinds of surfaces but not others. In a paper published by PNAS Nexus, a new journal from Oxford Academic, Patteson and graduate student Merrill Asp, along with the collaboration of Professor Roy Welch of the biology department, describe the surprising findings from their recent work with bacterial colonies that has potential to help shape further understanding of all living systems and improve outcomes in medicine and health. These images reveal the conclusion that biofilms grow faster as substrate stiffness increases. Research to date combined with inherent attributes of natural microcosms make them strong candidate model systems for ecology.Serratia marcescens biofilms grown on soft (left) and stiff (right) polyacrylamide (PAA) hydrogels. We conclude that natural microcosms are as versatile as artificial microcosms, but as complex and biologically realistic as other natural systems. Using examples, we comment on the position of natural microcosms in the roster of ecological research strategies and tools. This enables tests of theory pertaining to spatial and temporal dynamics, for example, the effects of neighboring communities on local diversity, or the effects of biodiversity on ecosystem function. These studies combine the microcosm advantages of small size, short generation times, contained structure and hierarchical spatial arrangement with advantages of field studies: natural environmental variance, 'openness' and realistic species combinations with shared evolutionary histories. Simple Summary Model tests under laboratory conditions are very common in soil ecology and microbiology, but few of them are related to flooding, and comparison of the results of such an experiment with natural conditions is unprecedented. ![]() ![]() Several recent, high-impact ecological studies feature natural microcosms as tools for testing effects of fragmentation, metacommunity theory or links between biodiversity and ecosystem processes. ![]()
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