Battling biofilms: developing better ways to eradicate bacterial contamination (WEBBER_Q17ICASE)

细菌感染仍然是发病率和死亡率的主要原因，我们治疗感染的能力正受到抗生素耐药性发展的挑战，预防感染比以往任何时候都更重要。人类和动物的大多数细菌感染以及食品和工业过程的污染都涉及生物膜中的细菌。生物膜是复杂群落中细菌细胞的聚集体，并且生物膜中的细菌固有地对抗生素和其他抗微生物剂（包括一些消毒剂）具有高度抗性。最近，我们已经记录了细菌如何对消毒剂压力作出反应，并表明某些消毒剂可以在无菌培养中选择抗生素抗性突变体。我们现在的目标是研究生物膜形成对这些过程的影响。清洁和消毒是目前用于尝试和根除关键表面上的生物膜的主要途径，尽管这通常是不成功的，这可能导致感染或污染的爆发。本项目与英国宝洁公司（P&G）的研发团队合作，旨在：了解细菌对消毒挑战的反应以及这对抗生素耐药性的影响开发改进的模型来测试消毒剂对生物膜的活性比较不同消毒剂杀死生物膜的功效，以帮助开发改进的产品该项目将联合收割机微生物学，遗传学和显微镜方法，以了解细菌应激反应以及不同消毒剂杀死或促进致病菌进化的能力。

Bacterial infection remains a major cause of morbidity and mortality and our ability to treat infection is being challenged by the development of antibiotic resistance, prevention of infection is more important than ever. Most bacterial infections of humans and animals and contamination of food products and industrial processes involves bacteria in a biofilm. Biofilms are aggregates of bacterial cells in a complex community and bacteria in a biofilm are inherently highly resistant to antibiotics and other antimicrobials including some disinfectants. Recently we have documented how bacteria respond to disinfectant stress and shown that some disinfectants can select for antibiotic resistant mutants in planktonic culture. We now aim to investigate the impact of biofilm formation on these processes. Cleaning and disinfection are the main current routes used to try and eradicate biofilms from critical surfaces although this is often unsuccessful which can lead to outbreaks of infection or contamination. This project is offered in conjunction with the research and development team of Procter & Gamble UK (P&G) and aims to:Understand how bacteria respond to disinfection challenge and what impact this has on antibiotic resistanceDevelop improved models to test disinfectant activity against biofilmsCompare the efficacy of different disinfectants in killing biofilms to help develop improved productsThe project will combine a mixture of microbiology, genetics and microscopy approaches to understand bacterial stress responses and the ability of different disinfectants to kill or promote evolution of pathogenic bacteria.