Bacterial deposition in a parallel plate and a stagnation point flow chamber: microbial adhesion mechanisms depend on the mass transport conditions

Deposition onto glass in a parallel plate (PP) and in a stagnation point (SP) flow chamber of Marinobacter hydrocarbonoclasticus, Psychrobacter sp. and Halomonas pacifica, suspended in artificial seawater, was compared in order to determine the influence of methodology on bacterial adhesion mechanisms. The three strains had different cell surface hydrophobicities, with water contact angles on bacterial lawns ranging from 18 to 85 degrees. Bacterial zeta potentials in artificial seawater were essentially zero. The three strains showed different adhesion kinetics and the hydrophilic bacterium H. pacifica had the greatest affinity for hydrophilic glass. On average, initial deposition rates were two- to three-fold higher in the SP than in the PP flow chamber, possibly due to the convective fluid flow toward the substratum surface in the SP flow chamber causing more intimate contact between a substratum and a bacterial cell surface than the gentle collisions in the PP flow chamber. The ratios between the experimental deposition rates and theoretically calculated deposition rates based on mass transport equations not only differed among the strains, but were also different for the two flow chambers, indicating different mechanisms under the two modes of mass transport. The efficiencies of deposition were higher in the SP flow chamber than in the PP flow chamber: 62+/-4 and 114+/-28% respectively. Experiments in the SP flow chamber were more reproducible than those in the PP flow chamber, with standard deviations over triplicate runs of 8% in the SP and 23% in the PP flow chamber. This is probably due to better-controlled convective mass transport in the SP flow chamber, as compared with the diffusion-controlled mass transport in the PP flow chamber. In conclusion, this study shows that bacterial adhesion mechanisms depend on the prevailing mass transport conditions in the experimental set-up used, which makes it essential in the design of experiments that a methodology is chosen with mass transport conditions resembling the problem under investigation.