Control of bacterial adhesion is important in a variety of natural and engineered systems. The factors that influence cell-cell and cell surface adhesion are not well understood. More critically, it is extremely difficult to prevent bacterial adhesion.

It is the long-term goal of this research team to replace relatively crude macroscopic measurements used to describe bacterial adhesion to surfaces (for example cell hydrophobicity via contact angle measurements or water-hexadecane partitioning) with methods that directly measure cell-surface interaction (repulsive and attractive) forces. For this project, we are developing the use of atomic force microscopy (AFM) to measure the homogeneity and topography of bacterial surfaces as well as to directly measure adhesion forces.