Multispecies Biofilms

Karishma S. Kaushik is a physician, scientist, and clinical microbiologist, with education and training that has spanned 15 years and two continents. After completing her medical degree and residency at the Armed Forces Medical College, Pune, India, she moved to the US to pursue a PhD in Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at the University of Texas at Austin. She returned to India in 2018, on the Ramalingaswami Re-entry Fellowship from the Government of India, that supports the return and research of early-career scientists to the country. She has started her independent research group at the University of Pune, and her research group studies complex infection states, notably in the context of biofilm infections, under human-relevant conditions. Her team is looking to gain comprehensive insights into infection microenvironments, towards developing precision-based, composite and non-conventional antimicrobial therapeutics approaches. Originally from the UK, Sophie E. Darch  completed her BSc in biomedical sciences at Lancaster University, followed by an MSc in medical microbiology at The Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. During her PhD she started to focus on bacterial diversity and communication in the cystic fibrosis lung at the University of Nottingham. After graduation she relocated to the United States and became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, followed by the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her love for biofilms continued throughout her postdoc, and since January 2019, she has been an Assistant Professor in the Morsani College of Medicine at the University of South Florida. Now in her own lab, she uses methodologies to observe and analyze bacterial aggregates in real-time, in three-dimensions and at the micro-scale.

“This book covers technologically advanced methods to study microbial communities. The authors do a very good job at covering methods to study multispecies biofilms. This volume would be very useful for both beginners and experts as it provides a general view and an in-depth description of each topic covered. … I highly recommend this volume for researchers working in biofilms.” (Monica Trujillo, The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 98 (4), December, 2023)

• 3M’s of Multi-Species Biofilms: Microbial Pathogens, Microenvironments and Minimalist Laboratory Approaches to Study Multi-Species Biofilms under Microenvironmental Conditions.- Methods for the visualization of multispecies biofilms.- In vitro, in vivo and ex vivo models to study mixed bacterial and fungal biofilms.- Current and emerging in vitro and in vivo biofilm models in investigating fungal-bacterial polymicrobial communities: Fungal-bacterial biofilm models.- Involvement of bacterial outer membrane vesicles in cell-cell interactions and their role in multi-species communities.- Polymicrobial biofilm models: the case of periodontal disease as an example.- Polymicrobial biofilms in cystic fibrosis lung infections: effects on antimicrobial susceptibility.- High resolution methods to study microbial interactions in biofilms.- Unity in Diversity: Interkingdom Polymicrobial Biofilms in Disease.