Abstract
Recently, it has been shown that silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) exhibit great potential for different applications, including food storage, cosmetic products, electronic components, biosensor materials, cryogenics, dental materials and especially for drug-delivery activities. In this study, we synthesized AgNPs with neem extract (NE) alone and mixed plant extracts of neem, onion and tomato (NOT) as a combined reducing and stabilizing agent by a green synthesis method at different pHs. The synthesized products were characterized by ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy (UV-vis), X-ray diffraction (XRD), dynamic light scattering (DLS), atomic force microscopy (AFM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The antibacterial effects of the synthesized products were studied by the Kirby disk diffusion method. It was confirmed that the AgNPs work effectively as a drug material against Gram-positive bacteria Staphylococcus aureus in nutrient agar. In addition, it was seen that the reducing and stabilizing agent NOT could work effectively with six medicines with a different nature at the maximum addition of 15 μg. However, the synthesized product with NE alone only worked for four of the medicines. Therefore, it was evident that the AgNPs synthesized with NOT extract were more susceptible to the Gram-positive bacteria Staphylococcus aureus. We believe that this new route for synthesizing AgNPs with NOT extract could be more beneficial in comparison to NE alone for improved antibacterial properties in drug-delivery applications.
Highlights
Nanotechnology is an emerging eld of interest for medical chemistry, materials science, atomic physics and many other elds
The tomato, onion and neem leaves were separately mixed in a beaker with 200 ml of distilled water and boiled for 20 min
Eight antibiotic medicine disks with a diameter of 6 mm and weight of 10 mg were introduced on a Petri dish at different spaces, and the synthesized NPs of different concentrations were added
Summary
The antibacterial activity of metal nanoparticles is most promising in the eld of drug delivery, where they are considered the most interesting materials in clinical research due to the increasing microbial resistance to metal ions, antibiotics and the resistance development of various strains.[2]. The major advantages of using extracts of neem leaves are that it is a commonly available medicinal plant and the antimicrobial activity in the green synthesis of AgNPs may be enhanced by capping with neem leave extracts.[5,6,7] The use of mixed plant extracts of neem, onion and tomato (NOT) is a very new eld, for which no one has reported results before It is very important because the mixture of three plants and the combination of different compounds play a vital role in synthesizing silver nanoparticles that perform with better antibacterial results because of the way the different compounds react with each other. According to the best of the knowledge of the authors, this is the rst study to report the green synthesis and antimicrobial activity of AgNPs conducted using extracts of several mixtures at different pH levels
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