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加重要。大多数人和动物的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。生物膜是细菌细胞在一个复杂群落中的聚集体，生物膜中的细菌对抗生素和其他抗菌剂，包括一些消毒剂具有高度的耐药性。最近，我们记录了细菌对消毒剂压力的反应，并表明一些消毒剂可以在浮游培养中选择抗药性突变体。我们现在的目标是调查生物膜形成对这些过程的影响。清洁和消毒是目前试图根除关键表面生物膜的主要途径，尽管这往往不成功，可能会导致感染或污染的暴发。该项目是与宝洁英国(P&G)的研发团队联合提供的，旨在：了解细菌如何应对消毒挑战，以及这对抗生素耐药性有何影响开发改进的模型，以测试消毒剂对生物膜的消毒剂活性比较不同消毒剂杀灭生物膜的效率，以帮助开发改进的产品该项目将结合微生物学、遗传学和显微镜方法，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.