Biofilm

The 5 Stages of Biofilm Development

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• published: 09 Jun 2015
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The five different stages are attachment, adhesion, aggregation, growth and maturation, and detachment. Because when they detach, then you're going to go and get attachment somewhere else. This is how colonies break off. When the high-rise building gets big enough, a couple of stories break off, they move somewhere else, and they form another building complex somewhere else. That's what happens with biofilm. Stage one is attachment. Basically, bacteria come into the body when there's a vulnerability or a weakness, particularly when the body is susceptible with low levels of cortisol or high levels of cortisol. When there are very low levels of beneficial bacteria. When a person has been taking lots of antibiotics or drinking lots of alcohol or has a high stress life. So the conditions have to be right for the attachment to occur. Attachment can occur anywhere, on the teeth, in the nose, in the throat, tonsils, urinary tract, bladder, many different areas in the digestive system where an attachment can occur. The conditions need to be right. The bacteria will settle in nicely there and bind and attach to a surface area. Stage number two, the adhesion. So now, the bacteria have to adhere more firmly into the wall, for example, the intestinal wall. They anchor in there. Anchoring means, they form a nice sort of strong, firm platform on how they can build other bacteria. And again, susceptibility has to really be there. Conditions have to be right. I typically find a lot of biofilm occurring in people with very low levels of lactobacillus when we do the stool test, the CDSA stool test, which I commonly do with patients. If we get very low levels of beneficials like one or even NG, like no growth, we can almost guarantee that the patient's going to have a lot of biofilm development. If the police are gone, before you know it, the criminals hang around town. If the police are completely gone and even the good citizens go away like the E.coli, we can even get ISIS or like seriously bad gangsters and mobsters hanging around, really bad bacteria. We can get like Citrobacter, for example, which I commonly see in three or four plus in very sick people. Adhesion needs to take place. That's the second stage. The third stage is aggregation, so this is the formation of the micro colonies. So now, we've got one or two floors of the high-rise apartment. Before you know it, there are three or four, five stories going up. And I can remember when the Twin Towers was destroyed in that horrific incident in New York years ago, how long it took for the new towers to be developed. They're beautiful now, the new towers. And it's wonderful watching all the photos of how the high rise just kept going up and up. And then there would be a problem maybe with material supply, but then they got another 10 stories and 20 stories. Now, we've got this beautiful big building again. Same with these micro colonies, but in this case, the floors got up quite rapidly. Because these colonies can aggregate very quickly. And before you know it, one building turns to two buildings and we've got hundreds of high-rises all in this congregation. That's aggregation. So the fourth stage is the growth and maturation. Now, these bacteria aggregates form very complex structures where the cells start nourishing each other and feeding each other. The exopolysaccharide-enclosed micro colonies are separated from each other, but there are channels running between them where nutrients and water can run to feed. So it's a bit like sewage systems, electrical systems in buildings, which is going to really allow the people to enjoy living in those buildings and to keep coming back and build bigger colonies. Food supply increases. Air increases. All these things are conducive toward very good and powerful biofilm formation. And that's what occurs. Nutrient and oxygen availability are very important, and they occur beautifully in these biofilms during the growth and maturation stage. And the fifth stage, of course, is the detachment stage when a couple of the stories on the top of the building will sort of float downstream and then they'll be looking for another site where they can attach themselves, and then the whole thing starts all over again. And before you know it, large parts of the digestive tract can be full of biofilm or in the nose. You can have a staph infection in the nose. It can be resistant to antibiotics, for example. I found it interesting that ozone therapy works quite well in the nose for eradicating the staph resistant MRSA. The bacteria that is resistant to antibiotics. Ozone seems to be a good one for blood, but also inhaling. There are ways of eradicating it, but we'll talk about that in another video. When a single bacterium is dispersed or aggregates of bacterium are dispersed and they move away, they will attach. They detach and they attach, and then they form a whole new biofilm.