Next generation approaches for biofilm research

环境保护意识的增强重新引起了人们对微生物介导的过程的兴趣，这些过程用于恢复受污染的环境并将废物和其他底物转化为增值产品，如乙醇。这些过程中的微生物通常与表面密切相关，在那里细胞作为生物膜生长。缺乏有关自然和工程环境中控制生物膜代谢的因素的信息，限制了我们充分利用或管理其活性的能力。同样，我们无法控制生物膜在临床环境中的存活和增殖，导致医院获得性感染和多药耐药性的惊人增加。我目前的NSERC发现资助使我能够开发新的方法来研究生物膜的形式和功能，这为从南非搬到瑞尔森以来的四年中建立许多学术和工业合作提供了平台。拟议的发现补助金的目标是进行基础研究，以补充其中三项合作：

Intensified awareness of environmental protection has renewed interest in microbially-mediated processes for restoring contaminated environments and converting waste and other substrates into value-added products such as ethanol. Microbes in these processes are often in close association with surfaces, where the cells grow as biofilms. A lack of information about the factors controlling metabolism of biofilms in natural and engineered environments limits our ability to fully exploit or manage their activity. Similarly, our inability to control biofilm survival and proliferation in clinical settings has resulted in an alarming increase in hospital-acquired infections and multi-drug resistance. My current NSERC Discovery grant has enabled me to develop novel approaches to study biofilm form and function, which provided a platform for establishing a number of academic and industrial collaborations during the four years since moving to Ryerson from South Africa. The goal of the proposed Discovery grant is to conduct fundamental research complementary to three of these collaborations: