Abstract
Since the introduction of modern dental implants in the 1980s, the number of inserted implants has steadily increased. Implant systems have become more sophisticated and have enormously enhanced patients’ quality of life. Although there has been tremendous development in implant materials and clinical methods, bacterial infections are still one of the major causes of implant failure. These infections involve the formation of sessile microbial communities, called biofilms. Biofilms possess unique physical and biochemical properties and are hard to treat conventionally. There is a great demand for innovative methods to functionalize surfaces antibacterially, which could be used as the basis of new implant technologies. Present, there are few test systems to evaluate bacterial growth on these surfaces under physiological flow conditions. We developed a flow chamber model optimized for the assessment of dental implant materials. As a result it could be shown that biofilms of the five important oral bacteria Streptococcus gordonii, Streptococcus oralis, Streptococcus salivarius, Porphyromonas gingivalis, and Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans, can be reproducibly formed on the surface of titanium, a frequent implant material. This system can be run automatically in combination with an appropriate microscopic device and is a promising approach for testing the antibacterial effect of innovative dental materials.
Highlights
More than 700 bacterial species inhabit the human oral cavity [1]
The present study focused on a selection of oral biofilm formers that reside within the oral cavity during health and/or disease: S. gordonii, S. oralis, S. salivarius, P. ginigivalis, and A. actinomycetemcomitans
For the induction of biofilm formation, S. gordonii and S. salivarius cultures were adjusted to an optical density (OD600; BioPhotometer, Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany) of 0.016 in Tryptic Soy Broth (TSB) medium modified by addition of 50 mM glucose (Roth) and stirred (VMS-C7 advanced, VWR; Darmstadt, Germany) for 24 h at 37 ̊C for biofilm formation
Summary
More than 700 bacterial species inhabit the human oral cavity [1]. While a large proportion of these bacteria are harmless commensals, opportunistic bacteria can trigger common oral diseases like caries, peri-implantitis and the chronic inflammatory disease periodontitis [1, 2]. Most bacteria within the oral cavity are sessile and form highly organised microbial communities, referred to as biofilm, on the surfaces of soft and hard tissues. Bacteria are embedded in a matrix of self-secreted extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) that determine the three dimensional structure of the biofilm [3]. As the EPS matrix shields cells in the biofilm from antimicrobials as well as from the host immune response, sessile bacteria can exhibit up to 5000-fold greater resistance to antibiotics than free floating (planktonic) cells [4]. There are PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0172095 February 10, 2017
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