from the conferences organized by TANGER Ltd.
Inorganic nanomaterials have large specific surface area and high bioactivity which made them promising alternatives to the traditional organic antimicrobial agents that are extremely irritant and toxic. In the present report, CdTe/ZnSe core/shell quantum dots (QDs) were conjugated with different nucleobases and their antibacterial activity against Escherichia coli was investigated. The CdTe/ZnSe core/shell QDs were synthesized in a green way or environment-friendly way using water as a solvent instead of organic solvents. They were successfully conjugated with different nucleobases and were characterized using fluorescence and absorbance spectrophotometry and dynamic light scattering techniques. The antimicrobial activity of all the samples along with control (bare QDs) was checked on E. coli, a commonly used bacterial model species in microbiology research. Almost all nucleobases showed good antibacterial activity comparing to control probably forming excess ROS which can disturb different metabolic pathways in bacterial cell. Guanine showed the best result among all other nucleobases.
Keywords: Quantum dots, nucleobases, antibacterial activity© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.