Abstract
Nanomaterials have displayed promising potential as antimicrobial materials. However, the antimicrobial mechanism owing to surface effects, where the emission of harmful substances such as metallic ions and reactive oxygen species is not required, is still poorly understood. It is important to figure out relationship between the physical properties and antimicrobial activity based on deep understanding of antimicrobial mechanism for their safe and effective applications. Here, we show that the work function is representative of the surface effect leading to antimicrobial activity, which originates from the electronic states of the surface. We investigated the antimicrobial activity and the work function of nanoporous Au-Pt and Au without the emission of Ag ion, and found that there was a positive correlation between them. In addition, we performed a first-principles calculation and molecular dynamics simulation to analyze the electronic states of the Au surface and the cell wall. These demonstrated that positive correlation was owing to peculiar electronic states at the Au surface, namely, the spilling out phenomenon of electrons. Our finding will contribute to advance the understanding of biological phenomena from a physical view.
Highlights
The surface effect owing to peculiar electronic states at the surface is one of the most important properties of metallic nanomaterials
A recent study showed that the cell wall of bacteria was negatively hyperpolarized after contact with the Nanoporous Au (npAu) surface and the hyperpolarized cell wall caused the structural change of ion channels, which led to the antimicrobial activity (AA) of npAu12
The work function was representative of the surface effect leading to the antimicrobial activity
Summary
The surface effect owing to peculiar electronic states at the surface is one of the most important properties of metallic nanomaterials. A first-principles calculation and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations were performed to analyze the electronic states of the surface and the cell wall. The two series of npAu-Pt showed lower AA than the npAu with a pore size of 20 nm, despite the smaller pore size of npAu-Pt. It is suggested that alloying with Pt changed the electronic states, resulting in reduced AA.
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