Fighting Antimicrobial Resistant Microorganisms: Current Status and Emerging Strategies Using Nanomaterials

PARAJE MG; PÁEZ PL

FRONTIERS IN BIOENGINEERING AND BIOTECHNOLOGY

FRONTIERS MEDIA S.A

Año: 2021

2296-4185

Antimicrobial resistance is a global crisis and, along with the availability of few effective antimicrobials, emphasize the need for new approaches and different safe and effective alternatives to current antimicrobials strategies. Recent progress in biomedical applications has been proposed to prevent or treat resistant pathogens due to the limited efficacy of antimicrobial agents. Metal nanoparticles (NPs) are attracting huge interest in nanobiology and nanomedicine fields as a new class of antimicrobial agents, because of their ease of preparation, their high stability over time, and lower probability of developing resistance by microorganisms. In the past 2 decades, NPs have received attention as a potential future treatment of a wide range of serious infections. Particularly metal NPs are considered promising due to their unique physicochemical properties, chemical composition, size, surface charge, and similar size to intra- and extra-cellular components that allow specifically interact with molecular and sub-cellular structures. Furthermore, the release of metal ions from these NPs also triggers the death of microbial pathogens. For example, most metal-based nanomaterials can generate broad-spectrum and potent antimicrobial activity by specific nano-biological effects including physical damage as well as cellular stress to inactivate microbial cells. In this sense, a disturbance in the prooxidant-antioxidant balance can lead to damage to carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids and, if this damage is not repaired, cell death can occur.