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Surface chemistry-dependent antibacterial and antibiofilm activities of polyamine-functionalized carbon quantum dots

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Abstract

Bacterial biofilm infection is perplexing people’s life. Systemic administration of antibiotics usually causes adverse effects and bacterial resistance. How to make antibacterial agents quickly penetrate and eradicate the biofilm without adverse effects is an urgent problem. Here, polyamine-functionalized carbon quantum dots (CQDs), abbreviated as CQD600, CQD1w and CQD2.5w, are synthesized by a simple hydrothermal treatment of citric acid and branched polyethyleneimine (bPEI) with different molecular weight (MW). It is found that the antibacterial activity is promoted with high MW of bPEI, which is due to the protonated amines on the surface of the CQDs. Moreover, in terms of eradicating mature Staphylococcus aureus biofilm, CQD2.5w possesses significantly higher activity than CQD600 and CQD1w because of stronger electrostatic interactions and longer surface coronas. Additionally, the cytotoxicity test exhibits the L929 cells can keep at high survival rates even treated with 500 µg mL−1 CQDs for 3 days. In this study, the surface chemistry related to antibacterial activity and low cytotoxicity give the chance in designing and developing better CQDs for biofilm infection.

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Acknowledgements

This study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81970972) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China (30920140112002).

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  1. Peili Li and Xu Yang contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Chemical Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210094, China

    Peili Li, Xu Yang, Xiaohu Zhang, Jianliang Pan, Wentao Tang, Weiwei Cao, Xuedong Gong & Xiaodong Xing

  2. School of Food and Biological Engineering, Xuzhou University of Technology, Xuzhou, 221000, China

    Jinwei Zhou

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Contributions

PL and XY were involved in investigation, data curation, formal analysis and writing—original draft. XZ, JP, WT, WC, JZ and XG were involved in investigation and formal analysis. XX helped in conceptualization, funding acquisition, supervision, methodology and writing—reviewing and editing.

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Correspondence to Xiaodong Xing.

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Li, P., Yang, X., Zhang, X. et al. Surface chemistry-dependent antibacterial and antibiofilm activities of polyamine-functionalized carbon quantum dots. J Mater Sci 55, 16744–16757 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-020-05262-6

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