In an age of antibiotic resistant infections, the study of biofilms is increasingly important. Microbes more than often exist in complex multi-species or polymicrobial communities, making infections difficult to detect, diagnose and treat. Given the increased focus on studying biofilms in research and laboratory settings, particularly under conditions that closely mimic the clinical state, it is important to get an overview of the recent methods, model systems and tools being developed and employed in this context.
This book offers readers the opportunity to learn more about current methods being used in the investigation of multi-species biofilms, both in vivo and in vitro. For this, the book highlights new technologies built and designed for the study of multiple species within biofilm communities, including those that can be leveraged for the evaluation of antimicrobial treatment approaches. The application of these state-of-the-art techniques to further ourunderstanding of multi-species biofilms will be discussed and the reader will learn how the clinical microenvironment and the development of biofilm communities are considered when developing such tools.
With cutting-edge contributions from experts in the respective domains, this book will benefit translational and basic research scientists, as well as clinicians, and is an informative resource for educators and their students.
Karishma S. Kaushik is a physician, scientist, and clinical microbiologist, with education and training that has spanned 15 years and two continents. After completing her medical degree and residency at the Armed Forces Medical College, Pune, India, she moved to the US to pursue a PhD in Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at the University of Texas at Austin. She returned to India in 2018, on the Ramalingaswami Re-entry Fellowship from the Government of India, that supports the return and research of early-career scientists to the country. She has started her independent research group at the University of Pune, and her research group studies complex infection states, notably in the context of biofilm infections, under human-relevant conditions. Her team is looking to gain comprehensive insights into infection microenvironments, towards developing precision-based, composite and non-conventional antimicrobial therapeutics approaches.
Originally from the UK, Sophie E. Darch completed her BSc in biomedical sciences at Lancaster University, followed by an MSc in medical microbiology at The Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. During her PhD she started to focus on bacterial diversity and communication in the cystic fibrosis lung at the University of Nottingham. After graduation she relocated to the United States and became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, followed by the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her love for biofilms continued throughout her postdoc, and since January 2019, she has been an Assistant Professor in the Morsani College of Medicine at the University of South Florida. Now in her own lab, she uses methodologies to observe and analyze bacterial aggregates in real-time, in three-dimensions and at the micro-scale.
