Robustness analysis of culturing perturbations on Escherichia coli colony biofilm beta-lactam and aminoglycoside antibiotic tolerance

BMC Microbiology

Research Article

Hans Bernstein¹  Philip S Stewart¹  Trevor R Zuroff¹  Ross P Carlson¹  Jenna Lloyd-Randolfi²  Lourdes Jimenez-Taracido³ 

[1] Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Center for Biofilm Engineering, Montana State University, 59717, Bozeman, MT, USA;Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Center for Biofilm Engineering, Montana State University, 59717, Bozeman, MT, USA;Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore Maryland, USA;Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Center for Biofilm Engineering, Montana State University, 59717, Bozeman, MT, USA;University of Cadiz, Cadiz, Spain;

关键词: Quorum Sense;    Robustness Analysis;    Initial Glucose Concentration;    Nutritional Environment;    Planktonic Culture;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2180-10-185

 received in 2010-02-28, accepted in 2010-07-07,  发布年份 2010

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundBiofilms are ubiquitous. For instance, the majority of medical infections are thought to involve biofilms. However even after decades of investigation, the in vivo efficacy of many antimicrobial strategies is still debated suggesting there is a need for better understanding of biofilm antimicrobial tolerances. The current study's goal is to characterize the robustness of biofilm antibiotic tolerance to medically and industrially relevant culturing perturbations. By definition, robust systems will return similar, predictable responses when perturbed while non-robust systems will return very different and potentially unpredictable responses. The predictability of an antibiotic tolerance response is essential to developing, testing, and employing antimicrobial strategies.ResultsThe antibiotic tolerance of Escherichia coli colony biofilms was tested against beta-lactam and aminoglycoside class antibiotics. Control scenario tolerances were compared to tolerances under culturing perturbations including 1) different nutritional environments 2) different temperatures 3) interruption of cellular quorum sensing and 4) different biofilm culture ages. Here, antibiotic tolerance was defined in terms of culturable biofilm cells recovered after a twenty four hour antibiotic treatment.Colony biofilm antibiotic tolerances were not robust to perturbations. Altering basic culturing parameters like nutritional environment or temperature resulted in very different, non-intuitive antibiotic tolerance responses. Some minor perturbations like increasing the glucose concentration from 0.1 to 1 g/L caused a ten million fold difference in culturable cells over a twenty four hour antibiotic treatment.ConclusionsThe current study presents a basis for robustness analysis of biofilm antibiotic tolerance. Biofilm antibiotic tolerance can vary in unpredictable manners based on modest changes in culturing conditions. Common antimicrobial testing methods, which only consider a single culturing condition, are not desirable since slight culturing variations can lead to very different outcomes. The presented data suggest it is essential to test antimicrobial strategies over a range of culturing perturbations relevant to the targeted application. In addition, the highly dynamic antibiotic tolerance responses observed here may explain why some current antimicrobial strategies occasionally fail.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Zuroff et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2010. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.