Biomedical and therapeutic applications of biosurfactants

During the last years, several applications of biosurfactants with medical purposes have been reported. Biosurfactants are considered relevant molecules for applications in combating many diseases and as therapeutic agents due to their antibacterial, antifungal and antiviral activities. Furthermore, their role as anti-adhesive agents against several pathogens illustrate their utility as suitable anti-adhesive coating agents for medical insertional materials leading to a reduction of a large number of hospital infections without the use of synthetic drugs and chemicals. Biomedical and therapeutic perspectives of biosurfactants applications are presented and discussed in this chapter

Exopolymeric substances (EPS) from Salmonella enterica: polymers, proteins and their interactions with plants and abiotic surfaces

When Salmonella enterica is not in a planktonic state, it persists in organised communities encased in extracellular polymeric substances (EPS), defined as biofilms. Environmental conditions ultimately dictate the key properties of the biofilms such as porosity, density, water content, charge, sorption and ion exchange properties, hydrophobicity and mechanical stability. S. enterica has been extensively studied due to its ability to infect the gastrointestinal environment. However, only during the last decades studies on its persistence and replication in soil, plant and abiotic surfaces have been proposed. S. enterica is an environmental bacterium able to effectively persist outside the human host. It does so by using EPS as tools to cope with environmental fluctuations. We therefore address this mini-review to classify those EPS that are produced by Salmonella with focus on the environment (plant, soil, and abiotic surfaces) by using a classification of EPS proposed by Flemming and collaborators in 2007. The EPS are therefore classified as structural, sorptive, surface-active, active, and informative