In this paper, we combine physics, microbiology and mathematics to study how bacteria attach to nanostructured surfaces, and how topography of nanostructured substrates can directly quantify the adhesion.
C. Spengler, F. Nolle, J. Mischo, T. Faidt, S. Grandthyll, N. Thewes, P. Jung, M.
Koch, F. Müller, M. Bischoff, M. A. Klatt, K. Jacobs. Strength of bacterial adhesion on nanostructured surfaces quantified by substrate morphometry. Nanoscale 11:19713–19722 (2019)
Aiming for 3D-structured materials for or against bio-adhesion, we studied mechanisms by which the bacteria adhere to different types of materials. Our insights help, for example, to prevent adhesion of pathogens (like Staphylococcus aureus) before the bacteria can begin to grow a biofilm, which protects individual bacteria from attack by antibiotics.
We found that the measured forces with which the individual bacterial cells adhered to nanostructured surfaces decrease with an increasing size of these nanostructures. In fact, with our morphometric analysis based on Minkowski functionals, we found that the strength of the adhesion force can be predicted from measurements of the surface area that is accessible to the tethering proteins with which the bacteria adhere to the surface. More precisely, we found that the ratio of the experimentally measured adhesion forces at the rough surface compared to a smooth surface agrees with the fraction of surface area that is accessible to the tethering proteins, which are about 50 nm long.
Michael Andreas Klatt 