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Applied and Environmental Microbiology, April 2009, p. 2528-2533, Vol. 75, No. 8
0099-2240/09/$08.00+0     doi:10.1128/AEM.02846-08
Copyright © 2009, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.

Antibody-Mediated Immobilization of Cryptococcus neoformans Promotes Biofilm Formation{triangledown} ,{dagger}

Emma J. Robertson and Arturo Casadevall*

Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York 10461

Received 15 December 2008/ Accepted 15 February 2009

Most microbes, including the fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans, can grow as biofilms. Biofilms confer upon microbes a range of characteristics, including an ability to colonize materials such as shunts and catheters and increased resistance to antibiotics. Here, we provide evidence that coating surfaces with a monoclonal antibody to glucuronoxylomannan, the major component of the fungal capsular polysaccharide, immobilizes cryptococcal cells to a surface support and, subsequently, promotes biofilm formation. We used time-lapse microscopy to visualize the growth of cryptococcal biofilms, generating the first movies of fungal biofilm growth. We show that when fungal cells are immobilized using surface-attached specific antibody to the capsule, the initial stages of biofilm formation are significantly faster than those on surfaces with no antibody coating or surfaces coated with unspecific monoclonal antibody. Time-lapse microscopy revealed that biofilm growth was a dynamic process in which cells shuffled position during budding and was accompanied by emergence of planktonic variant cells that left the attached biofilm community. The planktonic variant cells exhibited mobility, presumably by Brownian motion. Our results indicate that microbial immobilization by antibody capture hastens biofilm formation and suggest that antibody coating of medical devices with immunoglobulins must exclude binding to common pathogenic microbes and the possibility that this effect could be exploited in industrial microbiology.

* Corresponding author. Mailing address: Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, 1300 Morris Park Avenue, Bronx, NY 10461. Phone: (718) 430-2811. Fax: (718) 430-8701. E-mail: casadeva{at}aecom.yu.edu

{triangledown} Published ahead of print on 27 February 2009.

{dagger} Supplemental material for this article may be found at http://aem.asm.org/.

Applied and Environmental Microbiology, April 2009, p. 2528-2533, Vol. 75, No. 8
0099-2240/09/$08.00+0     doi:10.1128/AEM.02846-08
Copyright © 2009, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.





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