Biofilm-Forming Ability of Infectious Organisms on Biomimetic SurfacesAn In Vitro and Machine-Learning Analysis

The current study explores the adhesion and biofilm-forming ability of different opportunistic pathogens including Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Lactobacillus spp., Streptococcus mutans, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa on lotus leaf (LL) and peepal leaf (PL) inspired biomimetic hydrophobic surfaces. Surface topology that mimics the respective leaves was fabricated using polylactic acid by solvent casting. Water contact-angle measurements revealed varying degrees of material surface hydrophobicity with respect to the varying surface roughness. The biofilm formation was significantly influenced by the type of polymer surface (p < 0.005) and the hydrophobicity of the bacterial surface (p < 0.0001). Multilayer perceptron (MLP), a feed-forward neural network, gave the best results with 5-fold cross-validation and an accuracy of 85%. J48-base model predicted that organisms with a surface hydrophobicity of >57% had higher biofilm-forming ability than others. Similarly, polymers with low surface roughness (roughness < 0.46) had reduced biofilm formation. In conclusion, biomimetic hydrophobic surfaces reduce the biofilm formation on implants.