A theoretical analysis on self-organized formation of microbial biofilms

Biofilms with a conspicuous hierarchical and fractal structure have been paid much attention in recent years. Available analyses of biofilm formation typically employed macroscopic differential equations, simulation approaches such as cellular automaton (CA), diffusion limited aggregation (DLA), Monte Carlo simulation, and hybrid model, etc. This paper proposed a new non-equilibrium statistical mechanics framework to analyze the interactions among cells and their environment, and the self-organizing formation process of biofilm was elaborated. The paper tried to make a renewed attempt to illustrate the emergence of complexity of the biofilm community and reveal the mechanism of producing a macroscopic microbial biofilm pattern from the microscopic microbial cells' interaction. These studies may not only provide a more reasonable physical description on microbial biofilms, but also finds important engineering instructions. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.