Figure 1.

The growth of S. epidermidis cells exposed to increasing physico-chemical disinfectant concentrations. The growth curves for a single mixture of S. epidermidis biofilm or planktonic culture subjected to increasing temperatures (a) or concentrations of NaCl (b), NaOCl (c) or H₂O₂ (d) for 60 minutes. The plots at each physico-chemical disinfectant concentration depict the mean ± standard deviation of three independent experiments with three technical replicates. The blue dotted arrow represents the optimal temperature/concentration at which both S. epidermidis biofilm and planktonic cells were considerably stressed (growth reduced by almost 2-fold with reference to the highest CFU value).