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Applied and Environmental Microbiology, June 2004, p. 3758-3760, Vol. 70, No. 6
0099-2240/04/$08.00+0     DOI: 10.1128/AEM.70.6.3758-3760.2004
Copyright © 2004, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.

Bacterial Strains Isolated from Different Niches Can Exhibit Different Patterns of Adhesion to Substrata

Dewi P. Bakker, Bart R. Postmus, Henk J. Busscher, and Henny C. van der Mei^*

Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Groningen, 9700 AD Groningen, The Netherlands

Received 15 December 2003/ Accepted 20 February 2004

Various mechanisms have been demonstrated to be operative in bacterial adhesion to surfaces, but whether bacterial adhesion to surfaces can ever be captured in one generally valid mechanism is open to question. Although many papers in the literature make an attempt to generalize their conclusions, the majority of studies of bacterial adhesion comprise only two or fewer strains. Here we demonstrate that three strains isolated from a medical environment have a decreasing affinity for substrata with increasing surface free energy, whereas three strains from a marine environment have an increasing affinity for substrata with increasing surface free energy. Furthermore, adhesion of the marine strains related positively with substratum elasticity, but such a relation was absent in the strains from the medical environment. This study makes it clear that strains isolated from a given niche, whether medical or marine, utilize different mechanisms in adherence, which hampers the development of a generalized theory for bacterial adhesion to surfaces.

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* Corresponding author. Mailing address: Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Groningen, P.O. Box 196, 9700 AD Groningen, The Netherlands. Phone: (31) 503633140. Fax: (31) 503633159. E-mail: h.c.van.der.mei{at}med.rug.nl

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Applied and Environmental Microbiology, June 2004, p. 3758-3760, Vol. 70, No. 6
0099-2240/04/$08.00+0     DOI: 10.1128/AEM.70.6.3758-3760.2004
Copyright © 2004, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.

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