Silver Halide Nanoparticles as Antimicrobial Agents Against Pseudomonas Aeruginosa

Résumé du livre

For much of human history, microbial infections have been a problem. The discovery of antibiotics has led to the prevention of many deaths and allowed for surgeries that would be too risky otherwise to be performed. In the post-antibiotic era antibiotic resistance has become an ever-growing crisis. Overuse and misuse of antibiotics have allowed for the development of resistance to antibiotics by many strains of bacteria. There have also been very few new antibiotics that have been developed in the past three decades. Antibiotics act on single biological pathways of bacteria and can be deactivated with relative ease, particularly when bacteria are exposed to a subinhibitory concentration. Pseudomonas aeruginosa (PA) is a gram-negative bacterium that has been able to develop resistance to many antibiotics. Nanoparticulate matter has properties that differ from their bulk counterparts. Many metallic nanoparticles have been examined as antimicrobial agents. These nanoparticles tend to harm bacterial growth by many different pathways simultaneously, making the development of resistance by bacteria much more difficult. Silver has been used as an antimicrobial agent for much of human history. Metallic silver nanoparticles have been explored as antimicrobial agents, but systematic evaluation of other forms of silver nanoparticles has been rare. Silver halides are photoreactive materials, most used in paper photography. In this work, I systematically evaluate the antimicrobial activity of silver halide nanoparticles against PA. The preliminary results indicate that silver halide nanoparticles exhibit higher antimicrobial activity and better silver resistance profiles when compared with the metal silver nanoparticles.