Roadmap on emerging concepts in the physical biology of bacterial biofilms: from surface sensing to community formation. Author Gerard Wong, Jyot Antani, Pushkar Lele, Jing Chen, Beiyan Nan, Marco Kühn, Alexandre Persat, Jean-Louis Bru, Nina Høyland-Kroghsbo, Albert Siryaporn, Jacinta Conrad, Francesco Carrara, Yutaka Yawata, Roman Stocker, Yves Brun, Gregory Whitfield, Calvin Lee, Jaime de Anda, William Schmidt, Ramin Golestanian, George O'Toole, Kyle Floyd, Fitnat Yildiz, Shuai Yang, Fan Jin, Masanori Toyofuku, Leo Eberl, Nobuhiko Nomura, Lori Zacharoff, Mohamed El-Naggar, Sibel Yalcin, Nikhil Malvankar, Mauricio Rojas-Andrade, Allon Hochbaum, Jing Yan, Howard Stone, Ned Wingreen, Bonnie Bassler, Yilin Wu, Haoran Xu, Knut Drescher, Jörn Dunkel Publication Year 2021 Type Journal Article Abstract Bacterial biofilms are communities of bacteria that exist as aggregates that can adhere to surfaces or be free-standing. This complex, social mode of cellular organization is fundamental to the physiology of microbes and often exhibits surprising behavior. Bacterial biofilms are more than the sum of their parts: single-cell behavior has a complex relation to collective community behavior, in a manner perhaps cognate to the complex relation between atomic physics and condensed matter physics. Biofilm microbiology is a relatively young field by biology standards, but it has already attracted intense attention from physicists. Sometimes, this attention takes the form of seeing biofilms as inspiration for new physics. In this roadmap, we highlight the work of those who have taken the opposite strategy: we highlight the work of physicists and physical scientists who use physics to engage fundamental concepts in bacterial biofilm microbiology, including adhesion, sensing, motility, signaling, memory, energy flow, community formation and cooperativity. These contributions are juxtaposed with microbiologists who have made recent important discoveries on bacterial biofilms using state-of-the-art physical methods. The contributions to this roadmap exemplify how well physics and biology can be combined to achieve a new synthesis, rather than just a division of labor. Keywords Quorum Sensing, Bacterial Adhesion, Biofilms, Bacterial Physiological Phenomena Journal Phys Biol Volume 18 Issue 5 Date Published 2021 Jun 23 ISSN Number 1478-3975 DOI 10.1088/1478-3975/abdc0e Alternate Journal Phys Biol PMCID PMC8506656 PMID 33462162 PubMedPubMed CentralGoogle ScholarBibTeXEndNote X3 XML