Speaker
Description
It has been hypothesised that a mechanism for antibiotic tolerance in bacterial biofilms -populations of bacteria embedded in an extracellular matrix - is the failure of the antibiotic to penetrate throughout the biofilm. In P. aeruginosa colonies for example, filamentous viral phages produced by bacterial cells have been shown to provide strong protection against antibiotics. Fluorescence and light microscopy imaging reveal reduced uptake of antibiotics by cells associated with phages, suggesting that they act as a barrier to diffusion. Binding is known to affect diffusion in other biological systems, such as antibody penetration in tumours. This poster presents a mathematical model for antibiotic diffusion in biofilms with binding to phages, and extensions to the model that I aim to work on as part of my PhD, in the hope of further elucidating the mechanisms by which phages protect bacteria in biofilms.
