Biofilms in drinking water: problems and solutions

Biofilms in drinking water distribution systems

Biofilms Impact on Drinking Water Quality

A paradigm shift currently occurs in microbiology, with significant impacts in a variety of environmental, medical and industrial applications. The old misconception of free floating microbes is invalidated by a different knowledge pattern: the great majority of terrestrial microorganisms live in communities associated to surfaces, called biofilms (Costerton et al, 1987; Flemming, 2008; Muntean...

Bacterial Community Analysis of Drinking Water Biofilms in Southern Sweden

Next-generation sequencing of the V1-V2 and V3 variable regions of the 16S rRNA gene generated a total of 674,116 reads that described six distinct bacterial biofilm communities from both water meters and pipes. A high degree of reproducibility was demonstrated for the experimental and analytical work-flow by analyzing the communities present in parallel water meters, the rare occurrence of bio...

Persistence of Helicobacter pylori in heterotrophic drinking-water biofilms.

Although the route of transmission of Helicobacter pylori remains unknown, drinking water has been considered a possible transmission vector. It has been shown previously that, in water, biofilms are a protective niche for several pathogens, protecting them from stressful conditions, such as low carbon concentration, shear stress, and less-than-optimal temperatures. In this work, the influence ...

Fate of Salmonella Typhimurium in laboratory-scale drinking water biofilms.

Investigations were carried out to evaluate and quantify colonization of laboratory-scale drinking water biofilms by a chromosomally green fluorescent protein (gfp)-tagged strain of Salmonella Typhimurium. Gfp encodes the green fluorescent protein and thus allows in situ detection of undisturbed cells and is ideally suited for monitoring Salmonella in biofilms. The fate and persistence of non-t...