Princeton researchers have for the first time revealed the mechanics of how bacteria build up slimy masses, called biofilms, cell by cell. When encased in biofilms in the human body, bacteria are a thousand times less susceptible to antibiotics, making certain infections, such as pneumonia, difficult to treat and potentially lethal.  

In a study published Sept. 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team at Princeton tracked a single bacterial cell as it grew into a mature biofilm of 10,000 cells with an ordered architecture. The findings should help scientists learn more about bacterial behavior and open up new ways of attacking biofilms with drugs. 

"No one's ever peered inside a living biofilm and watched it develop cell by cell," said Bonnie Bassler, a senior author of the paper and the Squibb Professor in Molecular Biology at Princeton, as well as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. "With this paper, we can now understand for the first time how communities of bacteria form a biofilm."