Effect of surface topology morphologies of silica nanocarriers on the loading of Ag nanoparticles and antibacterial performance

Abstract

It is of very significance to study the effect of the nanostructures and topology morphologies of nanocarriers on properties and performances in order to seek for the optimal structure. Herein, we fabricated three kinds of silica nanospheres with similar particle sizes, but different particle surface topology morphologies, including smooth surface of smooth silica nanospheres (SSNs), wrinkle surface of dendritic porous silica nanospheres (DPSNs) and rough spiky surface of rough hollow mesoporous silica nanospheres (RHMSNs). Subsequently, they were employed as nanocarriers and modified with aminopropyl groups to load Ag nanoparticles (NPs) for the comparison of antibacterial activity. Due to the unique open superstructure, both DPSNs and RHMSNs achieved uniform and high density loading of smaller Ag NPs, compared with SSNs. Moreover, the antibacterial test showed that both DPSNs-NH2@Ag and RHMSNs-NH2@Ag caused the effective inhibition of bacterial survival of E. coli and S. aureus at low particle concentration (125.0 μg/mL), in comparison with SSNs-NH2@Ag (187.5 μg/mL). This work provides new understandings in the rational design of nanocarriers for efficient antibacterial agents.