Molecular Communications Pulse-Based Jamming Model for Bacterial Biofilm Suppression

Studies have recently shown that the bacteria survivability within biofilms is responsible for the emergence of superbugs. The combat of bacterial infections, without enhancing its resistance to antibiotics, includes the use of nanoparticles to quench the quorum sensing of these biofilm-forming bacteria. Several sequential and parallel multi-stage communication processes are involved in the formation of biofilms. In this paper, we use proteomic data from a wet lab experiment to identify the communication channels that are vital to these processes. We also identified the main proteins from each channel and propose the use of jamming signals from synthetically engineered bacteria to suppress the production of those proteins. This biocompatible technique is based on synthetic biology and enables the inhibition of biofilm formation. We analyze the communications performance of the jamming process by evaluating the path loss for a number of conditions that include different engineered bacterial population sizes, distances between the populations, and molecular signal power. Our results show that sufficient molecular pulse-based jamming signals are able to prevent the biofilm formation by creating lossy communications channels (almost -3 dB for certain scenarios). From these results, we define the main design parameters to develop a fully operational bacteria-based jamming system.