Biomachining of stainless steel: characterization by microscopic techniques

The degradation of materials due to corrosion induced by microorganisms, such as bacteria, is generically designed as microbial induced corrosion. This capacity of bacteria has been used for micromachining some metals by creating on the surface of the metal masks that only exposed the surface to be machined. Due to their small size the bacteria are able to create microchannels on the exposed area. Usually, this processing is made by extremophiles microorganisms onto metals such as copper or aluminium. In this work we report the use of two strains of bacteria, not reported in the literature, for the biomachining of stainless steel and its characterization by microscopy techniques.