The promise and peril of transcriptional profiling in biofilm communities

DNA microarray technology has been successfully used to identify genes that contribute to biofilm formation for a handful of bacterial species. However, as the number of profiling studies increases, it is becoming increasingly apparent that these data might miss important aspects of biofilm development. One reason for this is the inability of current experimental designs to resolve spatial and functional heterogeneity in the biofilm community. Thus, an emerging challenge is to use transcriptional profiling in combination with techniques that can identify and separate relevant subpopulations within a biofilm.