Abstract
Foodborne pathogens especially bacteria cause a vast number of diseases which leads to a high mortality rate in humans. Conventional antibiotics have been employed in an attempt to eradicate these pathogens and this has led to the evolution of a multidrug resistant bacteria strain. Thus, a new genre of antibiotics is prepared by using nanoparticles as they show effective antibacterial capabilities. Biosynthesized nanoparticles are less toxic to humans as compared to chemically synthesized nanoparticles which are prepared using toxic precursors. They also exhibit enhanced antibacterial action along with the biomolecules that help in their formation. Among most metal oxides, magnesium oxide (MgO) nanoparticles show unique antibacterial properties due to their exclusive oxide vacancies and crystalline structure. The antibacterial activity of MgO nanoparticles synthesized using leaf extract is further enhanced by the presence of phytochemicals. The present work is a comparative study of the antibacterial activity of MgO nanoparticles synthesized using three different leaf extracts: (1) Amaranthus tricolor, (2) Amaranthus blitum and (3) Andrographis paniculata and their reaction towards Escherichia coli which is a gram negative, food borne pathogen. The results showed that the ~78 nm spherical shaped MgO nanoparticles synthesized from A. blitum, exhibited the highest antibacterial activity at 60 µL dosage. In addition, the effects of the characteristics of the MgO nanoparticles such as size, morphology, concentration, surface charge and phytochemicals on antibacterial mechanism were also discussed.
Highlights
The yield of the nanoparticles depends on the crude phytochemicals extracted from the plants and this study aims at evaluating the antibacterial efficiency of crude phytochemical coated magnesium oxide (MgO) nanoparticles
The dosages used in the study are reported as μL to compare the antibacterial activity of MgO nanoparticles from three different plant extracts which yields different concentration of MgO nanoparticles as mentioned in literature [58,59]
The zone of inhibition is lower than the previous reports as the concentration used in the present work was much lower than mentioned in the literatures and as colloidal MgO nanoparticles were used against the bacterial strains
Summary
125,000 among them were children below age of 5 years [1] It is well known from previous reports that bacteria is the most important micro-organism which can spread lethal food-borne diseases [2,3]. It is urgent to develop an enhanced antibacterial agent to deal with these multidrug resistant bacterial strains mediating the spread of food borne diseases. Inorganic metal oxide nanoparticles such as ZnO [18], TiO2 [19], CuO [20] and MgO [21] have been widely studied as antibacterial agents. MgO nanoparticle is a unique metal oxide because it shows less toxicity towards hosts and compared to other metal oxide nanoparticles, it possesses various beneficial properties for biomedical applications including antibacterial activity [22,23]
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