Our interest in the S. aureus biofilm dispersal pathway broadened our interest in bacterial biofilm biology. In collaboration with the Center for Staphylococcal Research at UNMC, we have been and continue to investigate a number of properties of Staphylococcal biofilms. My group’s part of this collaborative effort lead to the discovery that the secreted nuclease (Nuc) has a major impact on the biofilm matrix, and we demonstrated that Nuc is a virulence factor regulated by the Sae two-component system. In collaboration with Dr. James McNamara (Iowa), we demonstrated that Nuc can be used as an imaging tool to detect S. aureus infection. Recently, we developed a new approach to identify extracellular DNA (eDNA) binding proteins, and currently we are characterizing proteins discovered from this screen.