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Graphene Oxide–Silver Nanocomposite As a Highly Effective Antibacterial Agent with Species-Specific Mechanisms

ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces2013Vol. 5(9), pp. 3867–3874

Citations Over TimeTop 1% of 2013 papers

Jia Tang, Qian Chen, Ligeng Xu, Shuai Zhang, Liangzhu Feng, Liang Cheng, Huan Xu, Zhuang Liu, Rui Peng

Abstract

Recently, graphene oxide (GO) based nanocomposites have raised significant interests in many different areas, one of which being antibacterial agents where sliver nanoparticle (AgNPs) anchored GO (GO-Ag) has shown promising potential. However, to our best knowledge, factors affecting its antibacterial activity as well as the underlying mechanism remain unclear. In this study, we fabricate GO-Ag nanocomposites with different AgNPs to GO ratios and carefully investigate their antibacterial activities against both the Gram-negative (G-) bacteria Escherichia coli ( E. coli ) and the Gram-positive (G+) bacteria Staphylococcus aureus ( S. aureus ). We discover that, compared to AgNPs, GO-Ag nanocomposite with an optimal ratio of AgNPs to GO is much more effective and shows synergistically enhanced, strong antibacterial activities at rather low dose (2.5 μg/mL). The GO-Ag nanocomposite is more toxic to E. coli than that to S. aureus . The antibacterial effects of GO-Ag nanocomposite are further investigated, revealing distinct, species-specific mechanisms. The results demonstrate that GO-Ag nanocomposite functions as a bactericide against the G- E. coli through disrupting bacterial cell wall integrity, whereas it exhibits bacteriostatic effect on the G+ S. aureus by dramatically inhibiting cell division. Our work not only highlights the great promise of using GO-Ag as a highly effective antibacterial agent but also provides more in-depth understandings of the interactions between microorganisms and GO-based nanocomposites.

Citations Over TimeTop 1% of 2013 papers

Abstract

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