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Connections are crucial. Bacteria may be most dangerous when they connect - banding together to build fortress-like structures known as biofilms that afford them resistance to antibiotics. But a biomolecular scientist in Israel and a microbiologist in California have forged their own connections that could lead to new protocols for laying siege to biofilm-protected colonies. Their research was published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (
PNAS), USA.
This interdisciplinary collaboration began with a lecture given at the Weizmann Institute of Science in the Life Sciences Colloquium. Prof. Dianne Newman of the California Institute of Technology was the speaker, and the Institute s Prof. Sarel Fleishman, of the Biomolecular Sciences Department, decided to attend, even though the lecture had no immediately apparent bearing on his own research. Newman described an enzyme she had discovered that could interrupt the metabolism of the biofilm-building bac