Abstract
Antibiotic therapy is the gold standard for bacterial infections treatment. However, the rapid increase in multidrug-resistant (MDR) bacterial infections and its recent use for secondary bacterial infections in many COVID-19 patients has considerably weakened its treatment efficacy. These shortcomings motivated researchers to develop new antibacterial materials, such as nanoparticle-based antibacterial platform with the ability to increase the chances of killing MDR strains and prevent their drug resistance. Herein, we report a new black phosphorus (BP)-based non-damaging near-infrared light-responsive platform conjugated with ZnO and Au nanoparticles as a synergistic antibacterial agent against Staphylococcus aureus species. First, BP nanosheets containing Au nanoparticles were assembled in situ with the ZnO nanoparticles prepared by a low-temperature solution synthesis method. Subsequently, the antibacterial activities of the resulting Au–ZnO–BP nanocomposite against the non-resistant, methicillin-resistant, and erythromycin-resistant S. aureus species were determined, after its photothermal efficacy was assessed. The synthesized nanocomposite exhibited excellent anti-S. aureus activity and good photothermal characteristics. The non-resistant S. aureus species did not produce drug-resistant bacteria after the treatment of multiple consecutive passages under the pressure of the proposed nanoantibiotic, but rapidly developed resistance to erythromycin. This work clearly demonstrates the excellent photothermal antibacterial properties of Au–ZnO–BP nanocomposite against the MDR S. aureus species.
Highlights
Infections caused by pathogenic bacteria seriously threaten human health; they can be effectively treated by antibiotics, which have served as the primary therapeutic weapon against bacterial infections for many decades
The ratio of the OD600 values at the end point of the antibacterial graph (i.e., 20 h) were 2.03 (MRSA1), 2.87 (MRSA2), 4.57 (MRSA3), 3.40 (MRSA4), 4.12 (MRSA5), 2.86 (MRSA6), 6.26 (MRSA7), and 2.55 (MRSA8) to the control sample. These results suggest the possibility of using AZB NPs as photothermal antibacterial agents against MDR S. aureus species
Antibacterial activity in terms of minimum lethal concentration (MLC), which is defined in this study as the required concentration of antibacterial agents to reduce 99.9% initial inoculum of bacteria after incubation for 16 h in terms of OD600 values, and the corresponding fold change for S. aureus ATCC 25923 treated with AZB or erythromycin at sub-lethal concentrations (0.5 MLC) for 10 passages, was compared (Table 1)
Summary
Infections caused by pathogenic bacteria seriously threaten human health; they can be effectively treated by antibiotics, which have served as the primary therapeutic weapon against bacterial infections for many decades. The absence of an efficient COVID-19 therapy combined with an increasing use of antibiotics can produce a strong damaging effect on human health and a global growth of the antibiotic-resistant bacterial pathogens with worse outcomes The treatment of these bacterial infections will become more challenging, owing to the increasing gap between the development of new effective antibiotics and the generation of new varieties of MDR bacterial species [1]. NPs as well as the photothermal properties of Au NPs and BP NS, we prepared a new NIR light-assisted synergistic Au–ZO–BP (AZB) nanoplatform and evaluated its antibacterial activity against S. aureus species under NIR irradiation and the possible emergence of bacterial resistance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study describing an AZB nanoplatform with the NIR-assisted photothermal antibacterial activity that can potentially eradicate drug-resistant species
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