How does the confocal microscope work?
What the machine does is it actually looks at one focal plane and then drops down to the next one so you see a sequence of optical slices as they go right down to the surface, which has been colonized by the bacteria. So if it was about a 50-micron biofilm you’ll see slices going slowly across. Then you can take that image and compile it and bring it back into a 3D image and then you can roll the image, you can look at it in the XY or right angles, which is the Z-axis. So confocal is fantastic and there are no preparative difficulties. What are the different types of biofilms? We always look at microbiology from a human point of view. There are good bugs and bad bugs, but the bacteria don’t know which are good and which are bad. For example P. aeruginosa is the predominant organism in alpine streams or any cold water systems, salt or fresh, it’s a very common organism. But it becomes a pathogen of cystic fibrosis; it doesn’t behave any differently in cystic fibrosis from what it does i
