Abstract
Quality and food safety represent a major stake and growing societal challenge in the world. Bacterial contamination of food and water resources is an element that pushes scientists to develop new means for the rapid and efficient detection and identification of these pathogens. Conventional detection tools are often bulky, laborious, expensive to buy, and, above all, require an analysis time of a few hours to several days. The interest in developing new, simple, rapid, and nonlaborious bacteriological diagnostic methods is therefore increasingly important for scientists, industry, and regulatory bodies. In this study, antibiotic-functionalized metallic nanoparticles were used to isolate and identify the foodborne bacterial strains Bacillus cereus and Shigella flexneri. With this aim, a new diagnostic tool for the rapid detection of foodborne pathogenic bacteria, gold nanoparticle-based centri-chronoamperometry, has been developed. Vancomycin was first stabilized at the surface of gold nanoparticles and then incubated with the bacteria B. cereus or S. flexneri to form the AuNP@vancomycin/bacteria complex. This complex was separated by centrifugation, then treated with hydrochloric acid and placed at the surface of a carbon microelectrode. The gold nanoparticles of the formed complex catalyzed the hydrogen reduction reaction, and the generated current was used as an analytical signal. Our results show the possibility of the simple and rapid detection of the S. flexneri and B. cereus strains at very low numbers of 3 cells/mL and 12 cells/mL, respectively. On the other hand, vancomycin-capped magnetic beads were easily synthesized and then used to separate the bacteria from the culture medium. The results show that vancomycin at the surface of these metallic nanoparticles is able to interact with the bacteria membrane and then used to separate the bacteria and to purify an inoculated medium.
Highlights
Foodborne infectious diseases represent some of the most common public health problems that generate an enormous social and economic burden worldwide [1,2]
One study, performed on pure iron oxide nanoparticles, suggests that these particles are known for their limited antibacterial activity [48]
The antibiotic at the surface of these nanomaterials is able to interact with its binding sites expressed at the surface of the bacterial strain in which it has affinity
Summary
Foodborne infectious diseases represent some of the most common public health problems that generate an enormous social and economic burden worldwide [1,2]. Shigella are non-spore-forming Gram-negative bacteria that cause a disease called Shigellosis or bacillary dysentery, which is responsible for 165 million diarrheal episodes and 600,000 deaths each year worldwide [10,11] The latter are highly transmissible pathogens, and some of their strains can cause active infections in humans with exposure to only 10 cells [8,12]. Vancomycin-coated gold nanoparticles were employed to develop a centri-chronoamperometric assay for the rapid and easy detection of two foodborne bacterial strains, B. cereus and S. flexneri This system is of great interest in the Biosensors 2021, 11, 205 bacterial sensing field, taking advantage of the ability of vancomycin at the surface of the nanoparticles to interact with a broad range of Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. A three-electrode electrochemical cell (screen-printed carbon electrodes (SPCEs) DRP-110) was obtained from DropSens (Llanera, Asturies, Spain)
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