Open Access Research Articlehaving an attenuated immuneresponse [7].It is known that Bt spores and those of other Bacillus species, presenting exosporium, have a higher hydrophobicity, conferring them a higher adhesive potential to diverse materials [8,9], such as those used in industrial food processing [1,[10][11][12][13]. To this respect, there are several reports on the in vitro capacity of these bacteria to adhere to stainless steel laminae and/or synthetic polymers [14][15][16][17][18].Bacterial adhesion to a surface is a two-phases process: in the first phase, planktonic bacteria are moved to a surface by the effect of physical forces such as Brownian motion, van der Waals attraction forces, gravitational forces, the effect of surface electrostatic charge and hydrophobic interactions; in the second phase of adhesion, molecular irreversible reactions between bacterial surface structures and substratum surfaces become predominant [19,20]. Adhesion is an essential stage for the formation and subsequent growth of biofilms [19,21,22].Biofilms are defined as microbial communities embedded in a polymer layer or matrix adhered to an inert surface or substrate, or to living cells or tissues [23,24]. Several members of the Bacillus genus are capable of forming biofilms in vitro at variable magnitudes dependent on the incubation time [6,25]. According to Auger et al. [25], less than 50% of the B. cereus and Bt strains showed capacity to form biofilm in their assays. Formation of biofilms has been related also to the resistance of these species to diverse antibiotics and disinfectants [26,27] found that the latent spores of B. cereus were more efficient in starting and forming biofilms as compared to bacterial cells in vegetative or sessile state. These same authors evidenced that the production of biofilm in cultures with spores depends on the growth curves, which does not occur in cultures in suspension, and could be related to the resistance of the biofilm to adverse factors.Despite the existence of important collections of Bt isolated from different regions of Mexico, few studies have focused on the possible associations and distribution of features that could contribute to the analysis and a better understanding of the relations at the level of species and subspecies of the very
AbstractSpores of Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), used as bioinsecticide, represent a potential contamination risk of the equipment used for food processing and could also induce potential gastrointestinal symptoms in special cases of susceptible individuals. The objective of this work was to explore the in vitro adhesion capacity of Bt spores and its relation to the ability to form biofilms. The adhering capacity of spores of 65 Bt strains was determined in stainless steel tubes, as well as their ability to form biofilms on polystyrene microplates. We analyzed the relation of these two features. All strains showed a variable adhering capacity to stainless steel, ranging from 0.04% to 1.21% of the initial spore load of ~1.7×10 7 CFU/ mL. Th...