Abstract
Access to clean and safe water supply remains inadequate in many developing countries. One of the key challenges is to remove pathogenic bacteria from the water supply via effective water disinfection technologies to prevent the spread of diseases and to ensure the safety of consumers. Herein, a highly effective point-of-use (on-demand) water disinfection technology, in the form of a polymeric scaffold called macroporous antimicrobial polymeric gel (MAPG), is demonstrated. MAPG is easy to fabricate, completely organic and possess inherent antimicrobial property which makes it non-reliant on inorganic compounds such as silver where the long-term toxicity remains unknown. MAPG is highly bactericidal and can disinfect bacteria-contaminated water (ca. 108 CFU mL−1) at a capacity of about >50 times the mass of the organic material used, inactivating >99% of both Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria including Escherichia coli, Vibrio cholerae and Staphylococcus aureus within 20 minutes of treatment. When fabricated in a syringe, MAPG eliminates E. coli from contaminated water source by >8.0 log10 reduction in bacteria counts (i.e., no viable bacteria were detected after treatment), and the syringe can be reused multiple times without losing potency. The MAPG technology is not only restricted to water disinfection but may also be applicable in other bacteria inactivation applications.
Highlights
The incorporation of inorganic nanoparticles or chlorine-releasing precursors in polymeric substrates/materials that are typically found in water disinfection devices are some of the most widely reported methods for inactivating bacteria in the water supply[11,12,13,14]
We demonstrated the fabrication of a novel material termed macroporous antimicrobial polymeric gel (MAPG) that exhibits excellent inherent antimicrobial activity against a range of Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria as a proof-of-concept for point-of-use water disinfection application
We demonstrated that MAPG can disinfect bacteria-contaminated water (>50 times the mass of the organic material used) and effectively inactivates >99% of bacteria from the bulk water within 20 min of treatment
Summary
The incorporation of inorganic nanoparticles (e.g., silver) or chlorine-releasing precursors in polymeric substrates/materials that are typically found in water disinfection devices are some of the most widely reported methods for inactivating bacteria in the water supply[11,12,13,14]. These materials generally exhibit moderate to good antibacterial activity. We report the development of a novel polymeric material which possess excellent inherent antimicrobial activity, termed macroporous antimicrobial polymeric gel (MAPG), that can effectively disinfect bacteria-contaminated water >50 times the mass of the organic content material used. The platform technology developed is restricted to water disinfection but may be applicable in other bacteria inactivation applications
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