Antimicrobial applications of nanotechnology: methods and literature

By J. Seil, Thomas J. Webster. International Journal of Nanomedicine, 2012

978 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The need for novel antibiotics comes from the relatively high incidence of bacterial infection and the growing resistance of bacteria to conventional antibiotics. Consequently, new methods for reducing bacteria activity (and associated infections) are badly needed. Nanotechnology, the use of materials with dimensions on the atomic or molecular scale, has become increasingly utilized for medical applications and is of great interest as an approach to killing or reducing the activity of numerous microorganisms. While some natural antibacterial materials, such as zinc and silver, possess greater antibacterial properties as particle size is reduced into the nanometer regime (due to the increased surface to volume ratio of a given mass of particles), the physical structure of a nanoparticle itself and the way in which it interacts with and penetrates into bacteria appears to also provide unique bactericidal mechanisms. A variety of techniques to evaluate bacteria viability, each with unique advantages and disadvantages, has been established and must be understood in order to determine the effectiveness of nanoparticles (diameter ≤100 nm) as antimicrobial agents. In addition to addressing those techniques, a review of select literature and a summary of bacteriostatic and bactericidal mechanisms are covered in this manuscript.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Materials Chemistry, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/47a5d41d18cb91d944c011e878fb8473504ab0fd

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Citations in the corpus

Alternative Antimicrobial Approach: Nano-Antimicrobial Materials (2015, background): “Nanotechnology today provides a sound platform for adjusting the physicochemical properties of numerous materials to generate effective antimicrobials [5].”
Green Synthesis of Metallic Nanoparticles: Applications and Limitations (2021, background): “Previous studies have reported that metal and their counterpart metal oxide nanoparticles have displayed toxicity towards numerous microorganisms [209,250].”
Synthesis of metallic nanoparticles using plant extracts. (2013, background): “Current and potential applications of nanoparticles in biology and medicine are further discussed in the literature (Fortina et al., 2007; Sahoo et al., 2007; Salata, 2004; Seil and Webster, 2012; Wagner et al., 2006; Zhang et al., 2008).”
Green Synthesis of Metallic Nanoparticles via Biological Entities (2015, background): “Futhermore, Ag nanoparticles can be used to control a number of plant pathogens in a safer way compared to conventional fungicides [281] and these metallic Ag nanoparticles have also been found to be active against cancer cells and plasmodial pathogens [282–285].”