#biofilms

Living Stones

Kidney stones are lumps of insoluble salts congregating in the kidney like sediment on a beach when there isn’t a strong enough current to sluice them out of the body. They can be incredibly painful when they eventually do flush out with urine. Sometimes patients suffer unexplained infections during treatment, and here researchers explore the reason why. They find that the most common type of kidney stone, composed of calcium oxalate, may be alive with bacteria. Captured in a cross section under a high-powered microscope, we see living bacterial biofilms (highlighted in green) among the layers of sedimentary chemicals (red and blue). Further studies reveal bacteria thriving in the urine-rich environment of the kidney may help the salts to clump together – all the more reason to stay hydrated.

Written by John Ankers

Image from work by William C. Schmidt and Ava Mousavi, and colleagues

Department of Bioengineering and Department of Urology, University of California Los Angeles, CA, USA

Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), January 2026

Biofilm made from fish skin could be a sustainable alternative for food packaging

Using the skin of an Amazonian fish known as tambatinga as the raw material, researchers at the University of São Paulo (USP) and EMBRAPA Pecuária Sudeste—a decentralized unit of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA) located in São Carlos, São Paulo state—have developed a biofilm that can be used in food packaging. A sustainable source of biopolymer collagen The tambatinga, the result of crossbreeding the female tambaqui (Colossoma macropomum) and the male pirapitinga (Piaractus brachypomus), is recognized for its excellent growth performance and as a valuable, sustainable source of collagen-rich material. Due to its tropical origin, the skin of this species may contain higher levels of amino acids, which can enhance the functional and structural properties of the gelatin derived from it.

Bacteria are found in the environment in the form of planktonic bacteria, which means they are swimming freely in the environment, or they are found in the form of biofilms, which are defined as communities of bacteria that grow attached to a matrix of exopolysaccharides, which are resistant complex carbohydrates, resistant to antibiotics and that are found attached to a biological or non-biological surface, such as the skin or the base of a boat 🚤

Biofilms are one of the biggest causes of persistent infection, especially in hospitals thanks to internal devices. Biofilms are immobile microbial communities that colonize and grow on superficial medical implants such as sutures, catheters and dental implants as they produce an extracellular polymeric substance causing infections that can only be attacked by removing the devices and that can trigger mental illness in the patient due to trauma of the treatment.

Biofilms provide protection to microorganisms not only due to alterations in pH, osmolarity or few nutrients, but also block the access of antibiotics and cells of the immune system, which causes a serious infection due to resistance to different antibiotics and resistance in antibiotic treatment.

Approximately 80% of chronic and recurrent infections in the human body are due to a greater extent to biofilms, since these bacteria have shown 10 to 1000 times more resistance to antibiotics than bacteria in the planktonic state.

Blood and urinary tract infections can be caused by biofilms due to internal devices such as heart valve implants, catheters, contact lenses, joint replacements, intrauterine devices and other implants including body modifications such as piercings. These infections can only be treated by removing the device. Antibiotic resistance has become a serious global health problem thanks to its indiscriminate use without knowing that we are only feeding and developing super bacteria that at a given moment can no longer be eliminated by passing into the bloodstream and causing sepsis ( generalized infection).

It is important that we do not self-medicate as this could only bring more serious problems, always consult your doctor and respect the doses and times.

Resource

Dharma, D., Misba. L., & Khan, A.U. (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13756-019-0533-3

 So this was a barren biofilm hot spot that I kinda poked around at for a bit while enjoying KY glade cress in-situ two weekends ago. I still would like to one day get these fully ID’d  at some point but all of these are very unique and strange, constantly overlooked species due to the obscurity of them.

 Photo is biofilm soup...

Collema spp. (black jelly crust lichen group) is mixed with Nostoc spp. (not N. commune so I have no clue really what it is? Any algal biofilm experts out there wanna point me into the id directions ) 

Astrella tenella 

 I am pretty sure this may be a delicate starwort, like a real one( not one of the variants of some hemispheric liverwort) , they don’t usually grow in large colonies and most of the pictures of them that get reported are false unless they have the small form and the dried bodies. The thallus is often partially dried to the point that it looks near dead or like little dots attached to decayed segments on the ground. With that said, I talked to two of my friends that are pretty adept/mastered at identification and they said they can’t truly validate any delicate starworts without their reproductive organs present. So I still don’t know for sure but maybe someone will help on INAT eventually. The delicate starwort is rather rare, weather that be due to exposed shallow slow seeps with large karsty sheets to keep competition low being a rare thing or that they get over looked all the time due to being small as heck, it’s unclear. There are like 11 out of 15 posts on I nat that are legitimate and truly fit  *research grade*  id and the rest are misidentified or mis-verified according to my friends. So who knows, this could just be one of the other cryptid and understudied Astrella spp.

Spotlight On… Regine Hengge

“Both intellectual progress and pursuing a science career requires taking risks”

Professor Regine Hengge is one of the leading figures in microbiology research today. Her current research primarily concerns signal transduction and regulatory networks in bacterial biofilms and stress responses. She has been awarded a number of prestigious prizes including the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize and an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant. She also holds elected memberships of several academies including Leopoldina and EMBO.

In the latest article in the FEMS Letters Spotlight series, Professor Hengge discusses her career history, current areas of study, and her advice to early-career scientists. She also discusses what it means to have a work-life balance and stresses that as a female scientist, it is possible to continue researching whilst having a family.

By severely curtailing the effects of antibiotics, the formation of organized communities of bacterial cells known as biofilms can be deadly during surgeries and in urinary tract infections. Yale researchers have just come a lot closer to understanding how these biofilms develop, and potentially how to stop them.

Biofilms form when bacterial cells gather and develop structures that bond them in a gooey substance. This glue can protect the cells from the outside world and allow them to form complex quasi-organisms. Biofilms can be found almost everywhere, including unwashed shower stalls or the surfaces of lakes. Because the protective shell can keep out potential treatments, biofilms are at their most dangerous when they invade human cells or form on sutures and catheters used in surgeries. In American hospitals alone, thousands of deaths are attributed to biofilm-related surgical site infections and urinary tract infections.

"Biofilms are a huge medical problem because they are something that makes bacterial infections very difficult to deal with," said Andre Levchenko, senior author of the study, which was published Oct. 5 in Nature Communications.

Bacterial biofilms, begone

By some estimates, bacterial strains resistant to antibiotics ­- so-called superbugs - will cause more deaths than cancer by 2050.

Colorado State University biomedical and chemistry researchers are using creative tactics to subvert these superbugs and their mechanisms of invasion. In particular, they're devising new ways to keep harmful bacteria from forming sticky matrices called biofilms - and to do it without antibiotic drugs.

Researchers from the laboratory of Melissa Reynolds, associate professor of chemistry and the School of Biomedical Engineering, have created a new material that inhibits biofilm formation of the virulent superbug Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Their material, described in Advanced Functional Materials, could form the basis for a new kind of antibacterial surface that prevents infections and reduces our reliance on antibiotics.