TY - GEN
T1 - Using competing bacterial communication to disassemble biofilms
AU - Martins, Daniel P.
AU - Barros, Michael T.
AU - Balasubramaniam, Sasitharan
N1 - Funding Information:
This work has received support from the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) via the CONNECT research centre under Grant 13/RC/2077, as well as the Academy of Finland FiDiPro program for the project "Nanocommunications Networks" 2012-2016, and the Finnish Academy Research Fellow program under Project no. 284531. This work has also been supported by EU funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the grant agreement No. 665564.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 ACM.
PY - 2016/9/28
Y1 - 2016/9/28
N2 - In recent years, bacterial infections have become a major public health concern due to their ability to cooperate between single and multiple species resisting to various forms of treatments (e.g., antibiotics). One form of protection is through biofilms, where the bacteria produce a protective medium known as the Extracellular Polymeric Substances (EPS). Researchers are pursuing new multi-disciplinary approaches to treating and kerb the evolving process of these infections through the biofilms, to lower the humans' antibiotic dependence that can result in the so-called "superbugs". Although various solutions have been proposed to break biofilms, they are based on applying drugs or using nanoparticles. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach, where bacteria will cooperate and surround the biofilms to consume the nutrients. By hijacking the nutrients in the environment and blocking the flow from reaching the biofilms, this will lead to starvation, forcing them to break their structure. Preliminary simulations show that a small action radius of quorum sensing molecules is needed to maximise bacteria attraction to a particular location and create the protective wall. Therefore, this formation is capable of speeds up biofilm dispersal process by two hours.
AB - In recent years, bacterial infections have become a major public health concern due to their ability to cooperate between single and multiple species resisting to various forms of treatments (e.g., antibiotics). One form of protection is through biofilms, where the bacteria produce a protective medium known as the Extracellular Polymeric Substances (EPS). Researchers are pursuing new multi-disciplinary approaches to treating and kerb the evolving process of these infections through the biofilms, to lower the humans' antibiotic dependence that can result in the so-called "superbugs". Although various solutions have been proposed to break biofilms, they are based on applying drugs or using nanoparticles. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach, where bacteria will cooperate and surround the biofilms to consume the nutrients. By hijacking the nutrients in the environment and blocking the flow from reaching the biofilms, this will lead to starvation, forcing them to break their structure. Preliminary simulations show that a small action radius of quorum sensing molecules is needed to maximise bacteria attraction to a particular location and create the protective wall. Therefore, this formation is capable of speeds up biofilm dispersal process by two hours.
KW - Biofilm
KW - Molecular communication
KW - Synthetically engineered bacteria
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84994504545&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2967446.2967463
DO - 10.1145/2967446.2967463
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84994504545
T3 - Proceedings of the 3rd ACM International Conference on Nanoscale Computing and Communication, ACM NANOCOM 2016
BT - Proceedings of the 3rd ACM International Conference on Nanoscale Computing and Communication, ACM NANOCOM 2016
PB - Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
T2 - 3rd ACM International Conference on Nanoscale Computing and Communication, ACM NANOCOM 2016
Y2 - 28 September 2016 through 30 September 2016
ER -
