Synthesis and Comparative Biological Properties of Ag-PEG Nanoparticles with Tunable Morphologies from Janus to Multi-Core Shell Structure.

Mengda Xu,Jie Liu,Xianfeng Zhu,Xiankui Xu,František Peterka,Yanrong Ren,Shanhu Liu

doi:10.3390/ma11101787

Mengda Xu, Jie Liu + Show 5 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/ma11101787

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Abstract

Silver nanoparticles synthesized with polymers as coating agents is an effective method to overcome their poor stability and aggregation in solution. Silver-polyethylene glycol (Ag-PEG) nanoparticles were synthesized with the thiol-functionalized polyethylene glycol (SH-PEA) as the coating, reducing and stabilizing agent. The UV irradiation time, polymer and silver nitrate concentration for the synthesis were investigated. The concentration of silver nitrate had significant effect on the morphology of Ag-PEG nanoparticles. When increasing the concentration of silver nitrate, SEM and TEM images showed that Ag-PEG nanoparticles changed from Janus to multi-core shell structure. Meanwhile, pure silver particles in the two hybrid nanoparticles presented spherical shape and had the similar size of 15 nm. The antibacterial activities and cytotoxicity of the two structural Ag-PEG nanoparticles were investigated to understand colloid morphology effect on the properties of AgNPs. The results of antibacterial activities showed that the two structural Ag-PEG nanoparticles exhibited strong antibacterial activities against Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis. The Janus nanoparticles had larger minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC) and minimum bacterial concentration (MBC) values than the multi-core shell counterparts. The results of cytotoxicity showed the Janus Ag-PEG nanoparticles had lower toxicity than the multi-core shell nanoparticles.

Highlights

Silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) have attracted increasing interest due to their unique physical, chemical and biological properties, including surface-enhanced Raman scattering, catalytic activity, non-linear optical behavior and broad-spectrum bactericidal activity [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
We present a facile and fast approach for the fabrication of silver-polyethylene glycol (Ag-PEG) nanoparticles with tunable morphologies in Janus and multi-core shell structure which was performed by photochemical reduction method with thiol-functionalized polyethylene glycol (SH-PEA) as the coating, reducing and stabilizing agent
We found that the concentration of AgNO3 played a key role in the morphology of aggregation in solution. Silver-polyethylene glycol (Ag-PEG) nanoparticles

Summary

Introduction

Silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) have attracted increasing interest due to their unique physical, chemical and biological properties, including surface-enhanced Raman scattering, catalytic activity, non-linear optical behavior and broad-spectrum bactericidal activity [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. Many methods have been reported for the synthesis of AgNPs with chemical, physical, photochemical and biological routes with tunable size and shape [10,11,12,13,14,15]. Stabilizing/capping agents have been utilized in the synthesis process of AgNPs to overcome this instability [16,17,18]. Among these agents, polymers are effective agents to form an outer shell coating to the silver cores or a carrier to loading AgNPs on their surface, providing a steric barrier to aggregation [19,20,21,22]. Studies have been found that the concentration or the types of polymers have some effect on the size, shape and properties

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