Talk:Bacterial lawn

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What's the scale of the pic? I can't tell if it's 1mm, 1cm or 1m across... Stan 20:39 10 Jun 2003 (UTC)

The longest raised mat area is a little over half a metre long. --mav

Ah. But clearly my question is too subtle of a hint :-) - could we please get a caption so readers know exactly what they're looking at? If this is one of those mega-mats in Yellowstone, let's say so. At first I thought it was an angled closeup of a petri dish. Stan 21:55 10 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Done. --mav

Is there a distinction between a bacterial lawn and a biofilm? My understanding of biofilm is that it is bacteria that form a community that has a complex multicellular structure. They cooperate and have differentiated roles - division of behavior much like a multicellular organism. They exchange molecular signals to coordinate behavior. --huddy

[biofilm primer]

I was wondering the same thing when reading the article. I don't know too much about bacterial lawns, so I can't say for sure that they are different. But I agree that a biofilm usually has multiple species of bacteria and archaea interacting in complex ways through biochemical signals and physical connections. This leads to much heterogeneity on all scales. Bacterial lawn seems to describe overlapping clonal colonies (i.e. each grown from a single cell own a petri dish) but with no real integration or structure implied.

The other distinction I've seen is that biofilms usually form on solid/liquid boundaries (e.g. enamel/saliva in a tooth, metal/water in a pipe, rock/water in a stream...) while bacterial lawns tend to be found on solid/gass boundaries (e.g. petri dish/atmosphere). Also biofilms have some kind of extra-cellular matrix to protect them and hold them together. I don't think this is a requirement of lawns.

I tend to think of them as separate ideas, although there is some minimal overlap. But I couldn't argue much against a view that considered biofilms to be a special case of bacterial lawns. --jmeppley

OK, I've done it. There are now 2 articles. I tried to incorporate all the existing text into one of the 2 pages. The Bacterial Lawn page is now basically a stub and the new Biofilm page doesn't read as well as I 'd like, but I think its an improvement. All the referencing pages seemed to refer to the correct redirect page, so I didn't change any links. Jmeppley 21:21, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] removed sentence

I just removed the sentence:

These regions are common on deep-sea floors, especially near hydrothermal vents.

I just edited the article to clarify that usual usage of bacterial lawn refers to conditions that generally only happen in the laboratory. (nutrient rich with no competition or threat or physical stress). Any bacterial (or archaeal) aggregations in the deep sea are going to be biofilms. Jmeppley 18:24, 27 October 2005 (UTC)