Public Release:  How do bacteria clog medical devices? Very quickly

Princeton University

A new study has exam­ined how bac­te­ria clog med­ical devices, and the result isn't pretty. The microbes join to cre­ate slimy rib­bons that tan­gle and trap other pass­ing bac­te­ria, cre­at­ing a full block­age in a star­tlingly short period of time.

The find­ing could help shape strate­gies for pre­vent­ing clog­ging of devices such as stents -- which are implanted in the body to keep open blood ves­sels and pas­sages -- as well as water fil­ters and other items that are sus­cep­ti­ble to con­t­a­m­i­na­tion. The research was pub­lished in Pro­ceed­ings of the National Acad­emy of Sciences.



The team of biol­o­gists and engi­neers intro­duced a small num­ber of bac­te­ria known to be com­mon con­t­a­m­i­nants of med­ical devices. Over a period of about 40 hours, the researchers observed that some of the microbes -- dyed green for vis­i­bil­ity -- attached to the inner wall of the tube and began to mul­ti­ply, even­tu­ally form­ing a slimy coat­ing called a biofilm. These films con­sist of thou­sands of indi­vid­ual cells held together by a sort of bio­log­i­cal glue.



The study was con­ducted by lead author Knut Drescher with assis­tance from tech­ni­cian Yi Shen. Drescher is a post­doc­toral research asso­ciate work­ing with Bon­nie Bassler, Princeton's Squibb Pro­fes­sor in Mol­e­c­u­lar Biol­ogy and a Howard Hughes Med­ical Insti­tute Inves­ti­ga­tor, and Howard Stone, Princeton's Don­ald R. Dixon '69 and Eliz­a­beth W. Dixon Pro­fes­sor of Mechan­i­cal and Aero­space Engineering.

"For me the sur­prise was how quickly the biofilm stream­ers caused com­plete clog­ging," said Stone. "There was no warn­ing that some­thing bad was about to happen."




Read the abstract.

Drescher, Knut, Yi Shen, Bon­nie L. Bassler, and Howard A. Stone. 2013. Biofilm stream­ers cause cat­a­strophic dis­rup­tion of flow with con­se­quences for envi­ron­men­tal and med­ical sys­tems. Pro­ceed­ings of the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences. Pub­lished online Feb­ru­ary 11.

This work was sup­ported by the Howard Hughes Med­ical Insti­tute, National Insti­tutes of Health grant 5R01GM065859, National Sci­ence Foun­da­tion (NSF) grant MCB-0343821, NSF grant MCB-1119232, and the Human Fron­tier Sci­ence Program.
