1995/10/01 by J. W. Costerton, Zbigniew Lewandowski, Douglas E. Caldwell +2 · 4,501 citations
Environmental Science · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Chemistry · #Microbial Community Ecology and Physiology #Bacterial biofilms and quorum sensing #Protist diversity and phylogeny #Biofilm #Bacteria #Microbiology #Biology #Chemistry #Genetics
paper · doi:10.1146/annurev.mi.49.100195.003431
published in Annual Review of Microbiology 49(1), 711-745 (Annual Reviews)
openalex publication_date 1995/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Direct observations have clearly shown that biofilm bacteria predominate, numerically and metabolically, in virtually all nutrient-sufficient ecosystems. Therefore, these sessile organisms predominate in most of the environmental, industrial, and medical problems and processes of interest to microbiologists. If biofilm bacteria were simply planktonic cells that had adhered to a surface, this revelation would be unimportant, but they are demonstrably and profoundly different. We first noted that biofilm cells are at least 500 times more resistant to antibacterial agents. Now we have discovered that adhesion triggers the expression of a sigma factor that derepresses a large number of genes so that biofilm cells are clearly phenotypically distinct from their planktonic counterparts. Each biofilm bacterium lives in a customized microniche in a complex microbial community that has primitive homeostasis, a primitive circulatory system, and metabolic cooperativity, and each of these sessile cells reacts to its special environment so that it differs fundamentally from a planktonic cell of the same species.