Talk:Biofilm: Difference between revisions

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See Talk:Bacterial lawn for the origins of this page. Jmeppley 21:20, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)

local air pollution

There's some vandalism at the bottom of the page, I thought it would be fine for me to delete i

From footnote 3, "Kim Lewis. Research Description -- works on antibiotic resistance and drug discovery, persister cells, and unculturable bacteria." (identical parts in bold):

Persisters are not mutants, but phenotypic variants of the wild type. We developed a method to isolate persisters and obtained their gene profile, which points to a dormancy program that is turned on in these cells (Keren et al., 2004). We find that proteins known as “toxins” that form toxin/antitoxin modules participate in persister formation. “Toxins” appear to be the exact opposite of what their name suggests, they reversibly block important processes such as translation, protecting the cell from bactericidal antibiotics that are ineffective against inactive targets.

From this article:

Persisters are not mutants, but phenotypic variants of the wild type. He developed a method to isolate persisters and obtained their gene profile, which pointed to a dormancy program that is turned on in these cells. He found that proteins known as “toxins” forming toxin/antitoxin modules are largely responsible for persister formation. “Toxins” appear to be the exact opposite of what their name suggests, they reversibly block important processes such as translation, protecting the cell from bactericidal antibiotics that are ineffective against inactive targets.

Originalname37 (talk) 20:39, 8 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Could someone mention stromatolites? I have little knowledge as I only learnt about them watching "Earth", that BBC documentary with a scotsman. --Squidonius (talk) 15:21, 18 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I was about to edit Bacterial_mat to include Media:Bacteria mats near Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone-750px.JPG instead of the link to the nonfree image, but I noticed that most of the limited content available in the Bacterial mat article is superceeded by this Biofilm article. I don't think any content actually needs to be integrated into this article, a simple redirect on the Bacterial mat page will do. Thoughts? Deculpep (talk) 13:26, 26 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see why this is even up for discussion, they are by definition two different things. A biofilm has to be adhered to a surface, a bacterial mat does not. It may not sound much, but it is a huge difference. When a biofilm detaches from a surface the cells begin to revert back to a planktonic mode of growth. --137.43.148.171 (talk) 18:39, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I started an article Microbial mat to support articles a group of are working on relating to evolution in the Ediacaran and Cambrian periods. The list of resources at Talk:Microbial mat will give you some idea of the way we're going. Microbial mats feature in or should feature in at least Cambrian substrate revolution, Cambrian explosion and Ediacaran biota.

Now I've found Biofilm and my impression is that a microbial mat is simply a biofilm that's large enough to a see with the naked eye. I suggest we need to sort out a division of labour between articles. Topics to be allocated to articles include:

• How they form from small beginings (currently described in Biofilm).
• Typical" structure and wide range of variation, depending on food and energy resources available.
• Where they form. Hostile environments.
• Evolutionary history, including origins over 3000 MYA and Cambrian substrate revolution about 505 MYA.
• Evolutionary importance, both as a promoter of and a constraint on the evolution of more complex organisms.
• Positive and negative impacts on humans - diseases; actual or potential industrial applications.

Philcha (talk) 23:44, 1 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Do you have a RS that states they are essentially the same thing? If we merge them, I support merging them under biofilm, which is a more recognized term. II | (t - c) 06:32, 2 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Re whether the same, see the sources listed at Talk:Microbial mat.

I did not propose merging the articles - my phrase "division of labour between articles" implies the existence of separate articles.

In fact I would strongly recommend keeping the evolution-related aspects in a separate article, since: adding a time dimension extending over more than 3000 MY is likely to cause a lot of content to be added; a lot of this is likely to be about whether one can be sure that various features in rocks are evidence that a microbial mat was present 00s or 000s of MYA, or about whether such evidence tells us much about the composition and functioning of the mat; there seems to be quite a lot of research going on at present about mats that did not build stromatolites; and that will just be the starting point for analysis of reciprocal influences between mats and the evolution of animals (see e.g. Cambrian substrate revolution, on which work has only recently started. Philcha (talk) 09:04, 2 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The talk page lists a lot of sources -- I take that as a yes, some of these sources do equate the two? You've noticed that there is a merge tag on this article, yes? I got bacterial and microbial mat confused, sorry. Personally, I don't think we need another article on this same topic, but since you appear to be interested and well-versed on the evolutionary aspects, microbial mats could be a subarticle of this perhaps titled "Biofilms in evolution". II | (t - c) 09:25, 2 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think Philcha, nor any of the sources he listed, proposed "merging" the two articles. Some people may describe a microbial mat as a biofilm; I've no interest in getting involved in semantic warfare. But microbial mats demark at most a very small subset of "biofilms", and are considered as a separate entity in plenty of cases - take the ones listed by Philcha for starters and multiply by a few hundred. They DEFINITELY deserve their own article; there's so much to be said about evolution, fossil record, taphonomy, disappearance, relation to stromatolites, and more, not to mention talk of contemporaneous microbialites! With the exception of the first, all of the questions raised by Philcha have an answer that's specific to Microbial mats. Once that article is written, I suspect there'll be plenty of scope for a summary section in this article. The only difficulty is where to mention the formation of a colony; I guess that it could easily be copied from this article to microbial mat, as it's not overly long or complicated. That's probably much simpler than copying it to a template and transcluding it. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 10:13, 2 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]