Spatio-temporal interaction of bacteria mixture within biofilms

The biofilm ubiquitously exists on most wet surfaces. It is a protective shield of the bacteria and causes the difficulty in the disinfection. The irrigation of the biofilm by the specific swimmer bacteria can exacerbate killing of biofilm bacteria. Therefore, we precisely investigate the tunneling of swimmers bacteria within biofilms. These bacterial stealth swimmers create transient opened spaces in the biofilm. We found that these opened spaced in the biofilm is the obvious indication of the motion of the swimmers. We exploit both detected swimmer in one swimmer channel and the opened space in the other biofilm channel of confocal microscope video, in order to interactively improve the tracking of the swimmer's motion in the biofilm, which is implemented by improving a successful algorithm of single particle tracking. Moreover, we quantitatively study the swimmer trajectory, the opened space and their relation in the large-scale microscope video when the biofilm is separately irrigated by many different species of bacteria. We try to discover the influence of the irrigated bacteria on the biofilm. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V