Quintessential Primer on Biofilms Penned by Resident Expert
08/28/2007

J. William Costerton writes the first in a series on biofilms research.
By Veronica Jauriqui

The first in a 20-volume series exploring the wet and wild world of biofilms has been authored by USC Center for Biofilms Director J. William Costerton and distributed by Springer, an academic publishing house based in Germany.

The Biofilm Primer is a 206-page introduction to the field of biofilms, the slippery sludge that forms when bacteria adhere to wet surfaces. Costerton’s book explores how bacteria and fungi live in these complex and slimy communities, how they form into biofilms and attach to wet surfaces, and how they flourish in both engineered environments (like the gunk that grows on shower walls) and natural ones (the slime at the edge of a lake, the plaque on teeth, a child’s middle-ear infection).

This collection represents the first integrated series of published works on biofilms.  Previous texts were compilations of essays and research articles without a comprehensive theme or overall style.  Costerton will oversee the entire series, either writing or commissioning other scholars in the field to pen future volumes.

Since creating the field of biofilm research—coining the term in 1978 and establishing the first center for biofilm study at Montana State University in 1993—Costerton has seen this area of study explode.  He says that this series is yet another affirmation for his life’s work.

“In the late ‘70s when I started biofilms and published the first few papers on it, it was hard work and I saw a lot of reverses,” Costerton says.  “I remember that no one ever argued with me.  But if you’re in a family and you’re a little crazy, no one ever argues with you, they just ignore you.  That is what happened to me.  I would go to meetings and people would say, ‘yeah, sure.’  But they were profoundly dubious.”

Thirty years later and biofilms is studied in areas as diverse as marine biology, molecular biology and medicine.  Courses in biofilms are taught in 20 universities internationally, Costerton says.  But no existing textbook on the subject has been written.  Anticipating a need, Springer approached Costerton to develop a definitive series on biofilms research with the expectation that content would be used to create the first biofilms textbook.

“So really we’re writing an omnipotent textbook.  We don’t know what field it will be studied in, so we’re preparing a content with as broad a scope as we can,” Costerton says.

Future volumes in the series will be written on specialized fields in the study of biofilms, including its application in marine and molecular biology, biomedical engineering, medicine and dentistry.

Costerton commissioned Naomi Balaban, a professor in biomedical sciences at Tufts University, to write the series second volume on signal inhibitions to control biofilms.  Mark Shirtliff, a frequent collaborator with Costerton and professor of biomedical sciences at the University of Maryland, has written the third volume on device infections.  Both volumes were edited by Costerton and will be distributed by Springer later this year.

“This has been a joy to write, a completely fulfilling project,” Costerton says of The Biofilm Primer.  “I think that I’ll be working on this series for a long time, with the initial project and then with any rewrites or future editions.  And that suits me very well.”

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