Abstract
Drug-resistant superbugs (DRS) were isolated from hospital sewage waste and confirmed by a 16S rDNA molecular technique as B. filamentosus, B. flexus, P. stutzeri, and A. baumannii. Green nanotechnologies provide a new promising alternative pathway that was found to be much safer, eco-friendly, and has economic benefits over physical/chemical methods. Sargassum muticum (SM) mediated zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO-NPs) were proved to be photocatalytic and anti-microbial agents. Anti-microbial action was demonstrated by a maximal growth inhibition activity of 18 mm against A. baumannii and a minimal of 12 mm against B. flexus at 80 μg mL−1 concentrations. The anti-microbial mechanism of SMZnO-NPs employed a biphasic phenomenon persuaded by an osmotic shock that can attack the DRS bacterial cells directly and lead to death. In addition, photocatalytic activity was investigated by SMZnO-NPs for the degradation of methylene blue (MB) dye under different light conditions. Natural sunlight irradiation shows effective enhancement with the highest efficiencies of 96% being achieved within 60 min compared to UV-light and visible-light. The reusability of SMZnO-NPs provides up to 6 consecutive cycles towards MB decolorization for environmental water cleansing.
Highlights
Water pollution caused by pathogenic bacteria and industrial dye effluents imposes several health risks to humans and to the aquatic environment
The last few years have seen an enormous increase in drug-resistant superbugs (DRS); much emphasis was allocated to safety aspects of foods and water owing to cross spoilage or contamination caused by pathogenic microorganisms
And low-cost green synthesis was developed by S. muticum (SM) mediated zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO-NPs) through a complete green synthetic method
Summary
Water pollution caused by pathogenic bacteria and industrial dye effluents imposes several health risks to humans and to the aquatic environment. (i) We used aqueous extracts from the marine brown alga Sargassum muticum (SM) in order to obtain a bio-reducing agent for the ZnONPs synthesis as a natural product-inspired method.[27] This is a quite novel approach of green viable and facile methodology which plays a major role in several applications.[28,29] (ii) The green synthesis of SMZnO-NPs showed remarkable antibacterial activity against Gram-negative drug-resistant superbugs (DRS) such as Pseudomonas stutzeri (P. stutzeri; NCBI accession no.: MN045185); Acinetobacter baumannii (A. baumannii; NCBI accession no.: MN045188) than the Gram-positive such as Bacillus lamentosus (iv) This result reveals that seaweed (S. muticum) extract containing a phytochemical compound provides reducing properties for the fabrication of NPs. Green SMZnONPs could be employed effectively for environmental (medical and biological) applications to inhibit the transmission of DRS pathogens in the future
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