Our world is teeming with microbes, but in their natural environments they do not grow in frothy flasks as they do in the lab, and typically grow as communities of cells attached to surfaces (see image to the right). The ability to form such biofilms is not only important for environmental bacteria, but also for several human pathogens including Pseudomonas. In a recent paper from the Graham Hatfull lab, the authors describe a novel function for an hsp60 chaperone, GroEL1, which appears to play a dedicated role in the formation of mature biofilms of Mycobacterium smegmatis (Ojha et al. 2005).

The role of GroEL1 appear to be to modulate the synthesis of long-chain fatty acids that are required for generating mature biofilms. The related organism Mycobacterium tuberculosis - the causative agent of human tuberculosis - encodes a nearly identical GroEL1 protein, raising the question as to whether biofilm formation or fatty acid regulation are important for its pathogenic cycle, and could thus represent potentially novel targets for controlling this important human disease.