Adhesion plays a major role in the bacterial lifestyle. Bacteria can adhere to organic and inorganic surfaces, to each other, and of course to host cells during pathogenesis.

The focus of this book is: how are such adhesion phenomena best studied? Microbial genetics experiments have greatly enhanced our knowledge of what bacterial factors are involved in adhesion. For numerous reasons, though, biochemical and structural biology knowledge of the molecular interactions involved in adhesion are limited. One major problem has been a lack of interdisciplinary research and understanding in the field. On the one hand, the microbiologists lack detailed knowledge of the biophysical possibilities and have limited access to the frequently expensive instrumentation involved while on the other hand, the experts in these methods frequently do not have access to the biological materials, nor do they necessarily understand the biological questions to be answered. The purpose of this book is thus to overcome this gap in communication between researchers in biology, chemistry and physics and to display the many ways and means to investigate bacterial adhesion. We hope to stimulate new and ground-breaking research.

Zusammenfassung
Over the last few years, bacterial adhesion has become a more and more important and active scientific area, but the field lacks communication and scientific exchange between medical and microbiology researchers who work with the relevant biological systems, and biochemists, structural biologists and physicists, who know and understand the physical methods best suited to investigate the phenomenon at the molecular level. The field consequently would benefit from a cross-disciplinary conference enabling such communication. This book tries to bridge the gap between the disciplines.

Inhalt

1. Adhesins of human pathogens from the genus Yersinia; 2. Adhesive mechanisms of Salmonella enteric; 3. Adhesion Mechanisms of Borrelia burgdorferi; 4. Adhesins of Bartonella spp.; 5. Adhesion Mechanisms of Plant-Pathogenic Xanthomonadeae; 6. Adhesion by Pathogenic Corynebacteria; 7. Adhesion Mechanisms of Staphylococci; 8. Protein Folding in Bacterial Adhesion: Secretion and Folding of Classical Monomeric Autotransporters; 9. Structure and Biology of Trimeric Autotransporter Adhesins; 10. Crystallography and EM of chaperone/usher pilus systems; 11. Crystallography of Gram-positive Bacterial Adhesins; 12. The nonideal coiled coil of M protein and its multifarious functions in pathogenesis; 13. Bacterial Extracellular Polysaccharides; 14. Carbohydrate mediated bacterial adhesion; 15. The Application of NMR Techniques to Bacterial Adhesins; 16. Electron microscopy techniques to study bacterial adhesion; 17. EM Reconstruction of Adhesins: **18. Atomic force microscopy to study intermolecular forces and bonds associated with bacteria; 19. Assessing Bacterial Adhesion on an Individual Adhesin and Single Pili Level using Optical Tweezers; 20. Short time-scale bacterial adhesion dynamics; 21. Deciphering Biofilm Structure and Reactivity by Multiscale Time-resolved Fluorescence Analysis; 22. Inhibition of Bacterial Adhesion on Medical Devices.