Silicon nanostructure – Smart antibacterial, cost-effective implantable material for health care applications

Abstract

Silicon nanocomposites and nanomaterials have been instrumental in diagnose and effective treatment of bacterial complications. Over the years, usage of antibiotics for antibacterial applications has been a conventional remedy for their highly effectiveness nature, early pain relaxation, and cost effectiveness. But due to bacterial resistance to antibiotics, these medicines do not neutralise the bacteria completely rather provide a temporary solution against the microbes. The techniques applied for treatment of bacterial cells involves fusion of drug coated nanoparticles on bacterial cell walls and its impinging to the targeted bacterial cell wall for release of drug molecules to enter into the microorganisms. These nanoparticles can be polymeric nanoparticles, solid lipid nanoparticles as well as liposomes for anti microbial drug delivery. Also, nanoparticles-based technique for drug delivery has certain advantages over local antibiotic treatment since they favour release of drug at appropriate sites, offers no side effects having minimum drug resistance developments, enables drug solubility, and transport multiple drugs at a time. Further, tailoring of Silicon Nanostructures (SiNs) to obtain porous SiNs enhances their drug loading capacity for targeted delivery of antibiotics on affected cells. Effective bacteria neutralisation is hindered by the formation of biofilms around bacterial cellular cells to which antibiotics prove to be ineffective, however usage of SiNPs and SiNs provide to be an effective solution for easy malfunctioning of bacterial cells. In our prospects, Metal Assisted Chemical Etching (MAC-Etching) is adopted as the cost-effective fabrication methodology for obtaining versatile nanostructures of Si. The operating temperature and etching time have considerable effects on geometries of SiNs ranging from Si Nanoporous structures to highly branched zigzag porous Si Nanostructures. The high porosity levels of as obtained SiNs can be exploited as a potential advantage for drug coating and as an application in bio- implantable material in biomedical field. The so-obtained SEM images of SiNs are analysed using iMAGEJ software producing area distribution plots of all nanostructures. The results of simulation work depict that majority of SiNPs have negligible area having large surface to volume ratio, and so can be largely exploited for effective interfacing onto bacterial cells. Our work demonstrates the use of SiNs synthetization using MAC-Etching as smart anti-bacterial surfaces since the optimized response is obtained as the morphology of as-synthesised SiNs varies.