IISER Bhopal develops safe process to produce silver nanomaterials

Researchers used amino acid Tyrosine to produce nanomaterials of silver that had excellent antimicrobial properties. Tyrosine is present in many food items, including meat, dairy, nuts, and beans. 

 A team of researchers from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Bhopal has developed a safe and easy procedure to produce silver nanomaterials that can be used as antimicrobial agents.  The work has been published in the journal of the American Chemical Society – ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces. The paper has been authored by Subhajit Chakraborty, Preeti Sagarika, Saurabh Rai, Chandan Sahi and Saptarshi Mukherjee. 

Dire need for antibiotic substitutes in India 

Antibiotic resistance is a serious condition in which bacteria and other microbes that invade the human body become resistant to the antibiotics/antimicrobials that are meant to kill them. The problem is serious for India due to rampant and indiscriminate use of antibiotics in humans, livestock, and agriculture. There is thus a dire need for antibiotic substitutes and nanotechnological solutions such as those studied by the IISER Bhopal team are promising routes to take. 

Saptarshi Mukherjee from Department of Chemistry, IISER Bhopal, said, “Silver, the common ornamental metal, when present as nano-sized particles – one hundred thousand times smaller than the width of a single human hair – have good antimicrobial properties.” Medical practitioners have used silver in various forms to prevent infections and promote healing from ancient times.  

The researchers used amino acid Tyrosine to produce nanomaterials of silver that had excellent antimicrobial properties. Tyrosine is present in many food items, including meat, dairy, nuts, and beans. The researchers treated silver nitrate, the main component of the ‘election ink’, which is used to stain nails after voting in India, with tyrosine in the presence of caustic soda.

Tyrosine functioned as a reducing agent and capping agent to produce silver nanomaterials. On examining the product under high-resolution microscopes (TEM and SEM), they found two forms of silver nanostructures – nanoclusters and nanoparticles. The nanoparticles were found to kill microbes such as S cerevisiae (associated with pneumonia, peritonitis, UTI etc.), C albicans (oral and genital infections), E coli (stomach infection), and B cereus (stomach infection), in about four hours. 

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