Studies on the Inhibition of Dental Biofilm Formation Using Plant Extracts in the Simulation of Mouth System

Abstract

For most of the history of microbiology, microorganisms have primarily been newlinecharacterized as planktonic, freely suspended cells and described on the basis of their growth characteristics in nutritionally rich culture media (Donlan, 2002). The extent to which microbial growth and development occurred on surfaces, as complex communities had not been clearly fathomed (Hall-Stoodley et al., 2004). It was in the 1970s that scientists began to appreciate that in most natural environments, majority newlineof bacterial biomass exist in the form of surface-associated microbial communities newline(Costerton et al., 1999). Such a population of surface-associated well organised, cooperating communities of microorganisms then came to be referred to as a Biofilm ,a term coined by Bill Costerton in 1978 (Kolter, 2010; Kokare et al., 2009; Chandki et al., 2011). The widespread recognition that biofilms possessed the ability to impact a newlineplethora of varied environments from water pipes to catheters and stents of patients newlineled to a curiosity about molecular mechanisms underlying the formation and newlinemaintenance of these communities (Costerton et al., 1999). This interest triggered the development of various imaging techniques and experimental models that have now elucidated that biofilms are not simply passive assemblages of cells that are stuck to surfaces, but are structurally and dynamically complex biological systems (Hall-Stoodley et al., 2004). In 2002, Donlan and Costerton offered the most salient description of a biofilm by describing it as a microbially derived sessile community characterized by cells that are irreversibly attached to a substratum or interface or to each other, are embedded in a matrix of extracellular polymeric substances that they have produced, and exhibit an altered phenotype with respect to growth rate and gene newlinetranscription (Donlan and Costerton, 2002).