The underlying idea of this thesis is that the surface chemical and
morphological nature of bacterial strains uniquely differentiates one from another and
hence can be used as the basis for their identification and control. It follows that their
interactions with an artificial substratum uniquely characterize them. In principle,
potentially it is easier and faster to evaluate the interfacial energy between a
bacterium and a substratum than to characterize its genome or determine molecular
biomarkers characteristic of the strain, hence validation of this thesis opens the way to
rapid screening and diagnosis. Auxiliary to this main idea, an advanced metrology for
evaluating the interfacial energies has been developed, exploiting the power of kinetic
analysis
