Stainless steel and titanium substrata were line structured and various surface topographies for titanium substrata were prepared to analyze their effect on biofilm formation of a GFP-expressing Escherichia coli. The strain was batch cultivated in a custom built flow-cell initially for 18 hours, followed by continuous cultivation for 6 hours. Confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) was used to determine the biofilm growth. Biofilm growth of E. coli GFPmut2 was not affected by the type of metal substrate used; rather attachment and growth were influenced by variable shapes of the microstructured titanium surfaces. In this study, biofilm cultivation in flow-cells was coupled with the most widely used biofilm analytical technique (CLSM) to study the time course of growth and development of a GFP-expressing biofilm on metallic surfaces without intermittent sampling or disturbing the natural progression of the biofilm.

Daniel Kleine, Jonas Chodorski, Sayani Mitra, Christin Schlegel, Katharina Huttenlochner, Christine Müller‑Renno, Joydeep Mukherjee, Christiane Ziegler, R. Ulber; Monitoring of biofilms grown on differentially structured metallic surfaces using confocal laser scanning microscopy; Engineering in Life Sciences, DOI: 10.1002/elsc.201800176