| Description |
Biofilms are notoriously tolerant to antibiotics and a growing problem in modern healthcare, yet the inaccessibility of biofilm reactors hinders research in many instances. Existing biofilm reactors remain costly, time-consuming, and dependent on difficult-tomanage resources. To address this issue, the University of Utah's Bone and Biofilm lab developed the bead biofilm reactor to be more cost effective and significantly more accessible in terms of size and resources. This thesis seeks to (1) explore the scope of the biofilm problem in general and (2) assess the effectiveness of the bead biofilm reactor. This paper will accomplish the first by giving in-depth consideration to the danger biofilm presents to modern healthcare, exploring biofilm's characteristic defensive mechanisms, and discussing common antibiotic chemical modes of action. For the latter, the paper will present an experiment comparing the antibiotic tolerance levels of biofilm grown in the bead biofilm reactor against both the CDC reactor and the industry-standard MIC assay models. Each model ran with gram-positive bacteria Staphylococcus aureus or gramnegative bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa. We used ertapenem, moxifloxacin, and tobramycin as antibiotic agents due to their varied modes of action in order to showcase the breadth of biofilm defense mechanisms. Ultimately, the bead biofilm reactor showed similarly representative biofilm growth, albeit with a lower shear than the CDC biofilm reactor, while the MIC assay failed to predict inhibitory concentrations. These results demonstrate the limitations of current industry antibiotic research practices and find the bead biofilm reactor useful for future research with biofilm. |
