Enhancement of Antimicrobial Activity of Alginate Films with a Low Amount of Carbon Nanofibers (0.1% w/w)

Isaías Sanmartín-Santos,Ángel Serrano-Aroca,Finn Lillelund Aachmann,Beatriz Salesa,Sofía Gandía-Llop,Miguel Martí

doi:10.3390/app11052311

Abstract

The World Health Organization has called for new effective and affordable alternative antimicrobial materials for the prevention and treatment of microbial infections. In this regard, calcium alginate has previously been shown to possess antiviral activity against the enveloped double-stranded DNA herpes simplex virus type 1. However, non-enveloped viruses are more resistant to inactivation than enveloped ones. Thus, the viral inhibition capacity of calcium alginate and the effect of adding a low amount of carbon nanofibers (0.1% w/w) were explored here against a non-enveloped double-stranded DNA virus model for the first time. The results of this study showed that neat calcium alginate films partly inactivated this type of non-enveloped virus and that including that extremely low percentage of carbon nanofibers (CNFs) significantly enhanced its antiviral activity. These calcium alginate/CNFs composite materials also showed antibacterial properties against the Gram-positive Staphylococcus aureus bacterial model and no cytotoxic effects in human keratinocyte HaCaT cells. Since alginate-based materials have also shown antiviral activity against four types of enveloped positive-sense single-stranded RNA viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2 in previous studies, these novel calcium alginate/carbon nanofibers composites are promising as broad-spectrum antimicrobial biomaterials for the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Highlights

Polymer hydrogels are crosslinked materials capable of absorbing and retaining high amounts of water [1,2]
We have recently reported for the first time that calcium alginate/carbon nanofibers (CNFs) composites have antibacterial properties that can be exploited to combat multidrug-resistant pathogens such as the life-threatening multidrug-resistant Staphylococcus epidermidis [17]
Since other carbon nanomaterials such as graphene oxide have been shown to be antiviral against DNA and RNA viruses such as the pseudorabies virus and porcine epidemic diarrhea virus [21], we considered that incorporating this other type of carbon-based nanomaterials would enhance the antiviral action of calcium alginate

Summary

Introduction

Polymer hydrogels are crosslinked materials capable of absorbing and retaining high amounts of water [1,2]. Administration for human biomedical applications due to its excellent properties such as biodegradability, renewability, cost-effectiveness, non-toxicity, and biocompatibility [5,6] This polysaccharide biopolymer is used in a broad range of industrial areas such as water treatment, plastic packaging, and many other potential bioengineering fields [7,8,9]. This biopolymer can be cross-linked with Ca2+ cations to form hydrogels [10,11] with many physical properties that can be enhanced by adding very small amounts of carbon nanofibers (CNFs) [12]. CNFs are filamentous 1D nanomaterials with excellent chemical and physical properties such as mechanical and electric performance [15,16]

Methods

Results

Conclusion