BACTERIAL CONDITIONED MEDIA: AN EFFECTIVE AGENT AGAINST MYCOBACTERIUM SMEGMATIS BIOFILM

Goutam Mukherjee, Rusha Roy and Alok Kumar Sil*

ABSTRACT

Biofilm plays a major role in the pathogenesis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Due to the presence of this polymeric matrix, anti-mycobacterial agents fail to exert their activity and thus Mycobacterium exhibits drug resistance phenotypes. Considering this, the current study investigated anti-biofilm activity of several conditioned media obtained after different bacterial culture using Mycobacterium smegmatis as model organism. For this purpose, logarithmically growing Mycobacterium smegmatis cells were treated with 11 different conditioned media prepared from different soil bacteria. Among these, five of the conditioned media exhibited considerable activity against biofilm. Thereafter, these five conditioned media were added to biofilm encapsulated mycobacterial cells to verify their ability to disperse preformed biofilm. The result showed that all these five conditioned media have ability to disperse preformed biofilm. Consistent with this, when any of these five conditioned media was added along with either isoniazid or rifampicin to biofilm encapsulated mycobacterial cells, cell viability was reduced drastically indicating the fact that these five conditioned media augment anti-mycobacterial activity of isoniazid and rifampicin. Thus the present study identified five bacterial strains, the conditioned medium of which exhibited anti-mycobacterial biofilm activity and augmented the activity of isoniazid and rifampicin against biofilm encapsulated cells. Thus, the current study provides agents that have the potential to be used in anti-mycobacterial therapy and may help in public health management.

Keywords: Tuberculosis, Mycobacterium, Biofilm, Conditioned medium.