Figure 1.

Illustration of some common techniques for quantifying biofilm adhesion. (A) A shear rheometer is used to determine the viscoelastic and adhesive properties of bulk biofilms with different operating modes (Gloag et al., 2018). Yellow represents biofilm. (B) A centrifugal force is applied to biofilm-colonized plates installed on rotary tables to evaluate the biofilm adhesive strength (Ohashi and Harada, 1994). (C) A T-shaped blade is used to scratch biofilms off a surface to measure the energy required to detach a biofilm from the substratum (Chen et al., 1998). (D) A capillary force is used to peel hydrophobic biofilms off of hydrophilic substrates and measure the strength of the biofilm-substrate interaction (Yan et al., 2018). (E) Additionally, confocal-based techniques and (F) AFM-based techniques are commonly utilized for quantifying biofilm adhesion at the cellular scale. This figure is modified with permission from Boudarel et al. (2018).