Dear Colleagues,

Biofilms grow practically on all animate and inanimate surfaces exposed to aqueous environments, including but not limited to metals, polymers, living tissues, and medical implants. They are widely researched in biomedical, agricultural, and industrial settings and even reported and studied in spacecraft and international space station (ISS) environments. Biofilms can be incredibly beneficial or exceedingly harmful. For example, detached cells from pathogenic biofilms are known to transmit pathogens in food production facilities, water pipelines, and medical devices. The USA alone spends approximately USD 90 billion every year to deal with the associated infection challenges. Sulfate-reducing bacteria (SRB), a special class of microorganisms, are adept in colonizing and growing on metal surfaces. Furthermore, they play a pivotal role in accelerating corrosion on various metal surfaces and use oxidizing power to meet their metabolic needs. This special class of corrosion, known as microbiologically influenced corrosion (MIC), is responsible for an expenditure of approximately USD 4 billion/year in the United States. Many other biofilms have been reported to thrive in the most widely known harsh conditions, including the hot environments in deep biospheres (e.g., abandoned gold mines) as well as hot springs (Yellowstone national park).

This Special Issue of Microorganisms invites you to send contributions which take leverage of the data science toolkit to provide systemic and integrative resources to biofilm microbiologists. The topics comprised in this Special Issue are metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, meta-proteomics, meta-metabolomics, single-cell genomics, functional genomics, synthetic microbiology, bioinformatics, computational bioscience and potential impacts of biofilms on any environments. The issue will cover but is not limited to the following topics:

(1) computational methods for biofilm analyses;

(2) biofilm phenotypical responses;

(3) rules of life of biofilms grown on various surfaces;

(4) system biology and quorum sensing of biofilms;

(5) modeling biofilm–material interfaces;

(6) systems biology approaches for solving biofilm challenges, including tools of computer vision tools for biofilm image analysis, Artificial Intelligence approaches for biofilm detection, metagenomics of the microbiome community, and biofilm;

(7) biofilm dataset collection, information database, and data mining processes;

(8) predictive tools and artificial intelligence for analyzing biofilm at different omics levels;

(9) bioinformatics tools for biofilm engineering;

(10) biofilms in health and disease;

(11) plant biofilms; 

(12) computer simulation models to study biofilm development and dynamics.

Dr. Etienne Z. Gnimpieba
Prof. Dr. Rajesh Kumar Sani
Prof. Carol Lushbough
Prof. Dr. Parvathi Chundi
Prof. Dr. Venkataramana Gadhamshetty
Prof. Dr. Bharat Jasthi
Prof. Dr. Robb Winter
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Microorganisms is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• computational system biology
• meta-omics
• metagenomics
• metatranscriptomics
• metaproteomics
• metametabolomics
• single-cell genomics
• functional genomics
• synthetic microbiology
• bioinformatics and computational bioscience
• data mining and machine learning in microbiology