New PreMiEr Publication: Surface Material May Not Be Key to Stopping Bacterial Buildup in Buildings
A new PreMiEr study finds that surface material properties have minimal effect on early bacterial attachment in built environments, suggesting that microbial community strategies may be more effective than surface engineering for controlling biofilms.
A new PreMiEr study challenges a common assumption in built environment design: that engineering surface materials to be less hospitable to bacteria can meaningfully limit microbial colonization. Researchers tested seven materials with varying roughness, wettability, chemistry, and charge against four bacterial species commonly found in hospitals, including E. coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Staphylococcus aureus. Across all experiments, surface material properties had minimal effect on how much bacteria attached. Instead, bacterial traits proved more influential, with gram-negative species consistently showing greater attachment than gram-positive ones. The findings, published in a 2026 peer-reviewed journal, suggest that efforts to control biofilms in healthcare and other built environments may be better directed toward fostering stable, non-pathogenic microbial communities rather than modifying surfaces alone.
Read more here: https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.01.28.702373