Antimicrobial activity of metal oxide nanoparticles against Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria: a comparative study

By A. Azam, A. S. Ahmed, Mohammad Oves, M. S. Khan, S. Habib, A. Memić. International Journal of Nanomedicine, 2012

1,261 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background Nanomaterials have unique properties compared to their bulk counterparts. For this reason, nanotechnology has attracted a great deal of attention from the scientific community. Metal oxide nanomaterials like ZnO and CuO have been used industrially for several purposes, including cosmetics, paints, plastics, and textiles. A common feature that these nanoparticles exhibit is their antimicrobial behavior against pathogenic bacteria. In this report, we demonstrate the antimicrobial activity of ZnO, CuO, and Fe2O3 nanoparticles against Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. Methods and results Nanosized particles of three metal oxides (ZnO, CuO, and Fe2O3) were synthesized by a sol–gel combustion route and characterized by X-ray diffraction, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, and transmission electron microscopy techniques. X-ray diffraction results confirmed the single-phase formation of all three nanomaterials. The particle sizes were observed to be 18, 22, and 28 nm for ZnO, CuO, and Fe2O3, respectively. We used these nanomaterials to evaluate their antibacterial activity against both Gram-negative (Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa) and Gram-positive (Staphylococcus aureus and Bacillus subtilis) bacteria. Conclusion Among the three metal oxide nanomaterials, ZnO showed greatest antimicrobial activity against both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria used in this study. It was observed that ZnO nanoparticles have excellent bactericidal potential, while Fe2O3 nanoparticles exhibited the least bactericidal activity. The order of antibacterial activity was demonstrated to be the following: ZnO > CuO > Fe2O3.

Subfields: Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8b77baf40c73b94997b348a7164e71b5fcf7aa6b

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In Materials Chemistry

1. S. Sinha Ray
2. A. Azzam
3. K. S. Siddiqi
4. Pragati Jamdagni
5. B. Amin
6. J. S. Rana
7. N. Safwat
8. E. Ebenso

Citations in the corpus

• Copper oxide nanomaterials: Synthesis, characterization and structure-specific antibacterial performance (2015, background): “Recently many metal oxide NMs such as Ag2O, ZnO, Fe2O3, TiO2, SnO2, CeO2 and polymer membrane composites [17–22] were shown to exhibit good antibacterial activities.”
• Synthesis, Characterization, and Antibacterial Activity of Polyindole/Ag–Cuo Nanocomposites by Reflux Condensation Method (2018, background): “Its potential in the field of medicine has been explored as an antioxidant([18]) and antimicrobial agents.([19]) It can be used in the area of gas sensors([20]) and solar energy conversion.”
• Preparation and antibacterial activity of chitosan-based nanocomposites containing bentonite-supported silver and zinc oxide nanoparticles for water disinfection (2015, background): “Both Ag and ZnO nanoparticles possess larger surface areas for interaction and higher reactivity than the corresponding bulk materials and therefore produce stronger antibacterial effects (Emami-Karvani and Chehrazi, 2011; Azam et al., 2012).”
• Green synthesis of zinc oxide nanoparticles using flower extract of Nyctanthes arbor-tristis and their antifungal activity (2016, background): “…which facilitate their exploitation in completely unrelated fields, such as, nanodiagnostics (Jamdagni et al., 2016; Syed, 2014), nanomedicine (Bobo et al., 2016; Chen et al., 2016) and antimicrobials (Ahmed et al., 2016; Sirelkhatim et al., 2015) on one hand and luminescence (Diallo et al.,…”
• Mycosynthesis of iron nanoparticles by Alternaria alternata and its antibacterial activity (2015, methodology): “The antibacterial activity of ZnO NPs was 72, 80, 88 and 84% more effective than Fe2O3 NPs, while 28, 31, 27, 50 and 40% more bactericidal than CuO NPs against E. coli, S. aureus, P. aeruginosa, and B. subtilis, respectively (Azam et al., 2012).”