Abstract
Dental plaques are biofilms that cause dental caries by demineralization with acidogenic bacteria. These bacteria reside inside a protective sheath which makes any curative treatment challenging. We propose an antibiotic-free strategy to disrupt the biofilm by engineered clustered carbon dot nanoparticles that function in the acidic environment of the biofilms. In vitro and ex vivo studies on the mature biofilms of Streptococcus mutans revealed >90% biofilm inhibition associated with the contact-mediated interaction of nanoparticles with the bacterial membrane, excessive reactive oxygen species generation, and DNA fragmentation. An in vivo examination showed that these nanoparticles could effectively suppress the growth of S. mutans. Importantly, 16S rRNA analysis of the dental microbiota showed that the diversity and richness of bacterial species did not substantially change with nanoparticle treatment. Overall, this study presents a safe and effective approach to decrease the dental biofilm formation without disrupting the ecological balance of the oral cavity.
Highlights
Dental plaques are biofilms that cause dental caries by demineralization with acidogenic bacteria
Perturbation in this community can result in a loss of mutualistic/symbiotic balance, leading to diseases including caries[1,2,3,4]. The aggregates of these microorganisms can deposit on the hard surfaces of teeth in an orderly manner, forming a protective sheath referred to as extracellular polymeric substance (EPS) and resulting in oral biofilms or dental plaques[5,6]
In this study, we demonstrate that dual action Carbon dots (CDots) could eliminate biofilm EPS and decrease S. mutans viability as an accurate representative biofilm-causing bacteria in an in vitro model of human teeth
Summary
Dental plaques are biofilms that cause dental caries by demineralization with acidogenic bacteria. We adopted CHX as the CDot preparation source to minimize the variability between the control and our resultant NPs. As will be shown in the comprehensive experiments, we confirmed that CHX will not persist during the synthesis step, and makes this approach an antibiotic-free treatment relying on the inherent electrostatic interaction and downstream effects to eradicate the biofilm of S. mutans.
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