Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
formation of biofilms. Alpha amylase produced by
Bacillus subtilis
(Kalpana
et al.
2012
), acylase produced by
B. pumilus
(Nithya et al.
2010a
), alginate lyase
(Lamppa and Griswold
2013
), and protease produced by
P. aeruginosa
and acti-
nomycetes (Park et al.
2012a
,
b
) were also shown to have antibiofilm potential
against human bacterial pathogens.
Numerous plants have been reported to display antibiofilm activities against
bacterial and fungal pathogens. Cinnamaldehyde (Brackman et al.
2008
), methyl
eugenol (Packiavathy et al.
2012
), casbane diterpene (Cardoso Sa et al.
2012
),
curcumin (Packiavathy et al.
2013
), taxodione derivatives (Kuzma et al.
2012
),
gallic acid and ferulic acid (Borges et al.
2012
), and ellagic acid (Sarabhai
et al.
2013
) are the notable plant products with potential antibiofilm activity.
The latest developments in the field of antibiofilm research employ novel agents
like peptides (Amer et al.
2010
; Choi and Lee
2012
; Reymond et al.
2013
; Zhang
et al.
2010
) and nanoparticles (Anghel et al.
2012
; Hernandez-Delgadillo
et al.
2012
,
2013
; Lellouche et al.
2012b
; Durmus and Webster
2013
; Martinez-
Gutierrez et al.
2013
; Sawant et al.
2013
) as antibiofilm agents. The synthesis,
properties, and the application of nanoparticles as antibiofilm agents will be
discussed in detail in this chapter.
2 Properties and Synthesis of Nanoparticles
Among the antibiofilm technologies that have recently emerged, nanotechnology is
one of the most promising. Nanotechnology can be defined as “a technology of
engineering functional systems at molecular scale.” Nanotechnology can also be
defined as technology involving design, synthesis, and application of materials and
devices whose size and shape have been engineered at nanoscale. Particles pro-
duced through nanotechnology are called “nanoparticles” and are typically sized
less than 100 nm. Nanoparticles are highly reactive and preferred over other
bioactive agents because of their higher surface area in contrast to their size. For
example, 1
μ
g of particles of 1 nm
3
size have the same surface area as 1 g of
particles of size 1 mm
3
. Huge surface area of these nanoparticles facilitates their use
as drug carriers.
Even though diverse chemicals like chitosan (Du et al.
2008
), carboxymethyl
chitosan (Zhao et al.
2013b
), poly-gamma-glutamic acid (Liu et al.
2013b
), cellu-
lose (Raghavendra et al.
2013
), zinc oxide (ZnO) (Dutta et al.
2013
; Jones
et al.
2008
), magnesium fluoride (Lellouche et al.
2009
,
2012b
,
c
), polyethy-
leneimine (Beyth et al.
2010
), hydroxyapatite (Evliyaoglu et al.
2011
), fullerene
(Patel et al.
2013
), lipids (terpinen-4-ol) (Sun et al.
2012
), and silica (Besinis
et al.
2014
; Li and Wang
2013
) were shown to be useful, metals are the prime
component of most nanoparticles. Derivatives of metals, like their oxides, form the
base material for synthesis of many nanoparticles. Silver (Antony et al.
2013
; Apte
et al.
2013b
; Besinis et al.
2014
; Chernousova and Epple
2013
; Jain and Pradeep
2005
; Mohanty et al.
2012
), gold (Annamalai et al.
2013
; Geethalakshmi and
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