Nam Kee-Myoung, Yan Jing
Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511, USA.
Quantitative Biology Institute, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511, USA.
Soft Matter. 2025 Feb 19;21(8):1436-1450. doi: 10.1039/d4sm01180e.
Biofilms are surface-attached bacterial communities encased within extracellular matrices that play significant roles in health and society and serve as prototypical examples of proliferating active nematics. Recent advances in fluorescence microscopy have facilitated an unprecedented view of biofilm development at the single-cell level, thus providing the opportunity to develop a mechanistic understanding of how biofilm development is influenced by mechanical interactions with the environment. Here, we review recent studies that examined the morphogenesis of biofilms under confinement at both single-cell and continuum levels. We describe how biofilms under different confinement modes-embedded and interstitial-can acquire various global geometries and forms of cell orientational ordering different from those in unconfined biofilms, and we demonstrate how these properties arise from the mechanical interplay between the biofilm and its confining medium. We also discuss how this interplay is fundamentally governed by the extracellular matrix, which facilitates the transmission of mechanical stress from the medium into the biofilm adhesion and friction, and serves as the key feature that distinguishes biofilms from classical bacterial colonies. These studies lay the groundwork for many potential future directions, all of which will contribute to the establishment of a new "developmental biology" of biofilms.
生物膜是附着于表面的细菌群落,被包裹在细胞外基质中,在健康和社会领域发挥着重要作用,并且是增殖活性向列相的典型例子。荧光显微镜技术的最新进展使人们能够以前所未有的视角在单细胞水平上观察生物膜的形成过程,从而为深入理解生物膜形成过程如何受到与环境的机械相互作用的影响提供了契机。在此,我们回顾了近期在单细胞和连续介质水平上研究受限条件下生物膜形态发生的相关研究。我们描述了在不同受限模式(嵌入和间隙)下的生物膜如何能够获得与非受限生物膜不同的各种整体几何形状和细胞取向有序形式,并且展示了这些特性是如何由生物膜与其受限介质之间的机械相互作用产生的。我们还讨论了这种相互作用如何从根本上由细胞外基质所调控,细胞外基质促进了机械应力从介质传递到生物膜的黏附与摩擦过程中,并且是区分生物膜与经典细菌菌落的关键特征。这些研究为未来许多潜在的研究方向奠定了基础,所有这些都将有助于建立生物膜新的“发育生物学”。