Summary of the Biofilms Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) Imaging  

According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), bacterial biofilms cause up to 75% of human infectious diseases. These infections usually recur repeatedly and are resistant to antibiotic treatment. Nowadays, it is very important to design or screen anti-biofilm molecules that can effectively minimize and eradicate biofilm-related infections. But without advanced imaging technology, it is impossible to conduct research on the formation and elimination of biofilms. Especially in biomedicine, morphological evaluation is the key and the first step to studying the impact of various drug treatments on clinical biofilms. The use or development of superior morphological techniques allows us to conduct detailed studies on biofilm structure, ultrastructure, 3-D architecture, cell population behavior, etc., and obtain unparalleled image quality with minimal sample loss. Therefore, it is very important to develop morphological research methods. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) has developed into an effective tool for morphological evaluation of biofilms. It can be used in combination with specific software to extract a large number of useful parameters from the image and help us understand the relevant information of biofilms.