Just dive in: Natural product hybrid provides antimicrobial and cell-resistant surfaces
August 1, 2008(PhysOrg.com) -- Infections following treatment in clinics, retirement homes, and long-term care facilities are a grave problem for patients, and resistant germs can be particularly devastating.
“High infection rates are in particular observed related to implants, catheters, and stents,” reports Karl Gademann, “those for urinary catheters mounting up to 30 % per week!” In cooperation with his team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, he has developed a process for coating surfaces with an antimicrobial layer. As reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie, their system is based on hybrid molecules derived from various natural products.
For a patient, the results are particularly grave if an infection occurs in an implant. Usually, replacement of the affected part is the only possible treatment. “One particularly attractive approach is the application of antibiotics directly on the material,” says Gademann. To test their idea, the team from Lausanne chose to use natural product hybrids: biologically active fragments of various natural products are coupled to combine two different modes of action.
The hybrid produced by Gademann’s team is made of three parts: two natural products are coupled by means of a polymer bridge. The first substance is anachelin, an iron transporter (siderophore) from cyanobacteria. Anachelin strongly and selectively binds metal oxides.
The majority of implants are made from a metal oxide: highly biocompatible titanium dioxide. Anachelin fixes the hybrid firmly to the surface of the implant. The second natural product is the antibiotic vancomycin, which disrupts the biosynthesis of cell walls and thus stops bacterial growth. The coupling component is polyethylene glycol, a chemically inert, nontoxic polymer. It also assures that dead bacteria and cell components cannot bind to the surface.
The hybrid can be applied to titanium dioxide components in a simple dunking procedure. “We were able to demonstrate that our hybrid firmly attaches to titanium dioxide surfaces and effectively hinders infection with Bacillus subtilis as well as the attachment of cellular material,” says Gademann.
Citation: Karl Gademann, Antimicrobial Surfaces through Natural Product Hybrids, Angewandte Chemie International Edition, doi: 10.1002/anie.200801570
Provided by Wiley
-
The hidden power of moss
Sep 22, 2011 |
5 / 5 (1) |
4
-
How do native Hawaiian birds survive in a fragmented forest?
Aug 17, 2011 |
4.5 / 5 (2) |
0
-
Cigarette ads have tobacco foes fuming
Aug 01, 2011 |
5 / 5 (1) |
3
-
Green tech cleans up with investors
Jun 07, 2011 |
not rated yet |
0
-
Tesla, other electric vehicles poised to enter the mainstream
Apr 11, 2011 |
5 / 5 (8) |
43
-
Engineers build first sub-10-nm carbon nanotube transistor
Feb 01, 2012 |
4.9 / 5 (31) |
30
-
Something old, something new: Evolution and the structural divergence of duplicate genes
Jan 31, 2012 |
4.6 / 5 (7) |
1
-
The hidden nanoworld of ice crystals: Revealing the dynamic behavior of quasi-liquid layers
Jan 30, 2012 |
5 / 5 (3) |
1
-
Stock market network reveals investor clustering
Jan 27, 2012 |
3.9 / 5 (23) |
8
-
Of microchemistry and molecules: Electronic microfluidic device synthesizes biocompatible probes
Jan 26, 2012 |
5 / 5 (1) |
0
More news stories
Fool's gold may prove an unlikely alternative to overexploited catalytic materials
Catalytic materials, which lower the energy barriers for chemical reactions, are used in everything from the commercial production of chemicals to catalytic converters in car engines. However, with current catalytic materials ...
16 hours ago |
4.4 / 5 (8) |
5
|
Unpicking HIV’s invisibility cloak
Drug researchers hunting for alternative ways to treat human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infections may soon have a novel targetits camouflage coat. HIV hides inside a cloak unusually rich in a sugar ...
16 hours ago |
5 / 5 (5) |
0
Hydrogen from acidic water: Researchers develop potential low cost alternative to platinum for splitting water
A technique for creating a new molecule that structurally and chemically replicates the active part of the widely used industrial catalyst molybdenite has been developed by researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley ...
Feb 09, 2012 |
4.8 / 5 (14) |
15
|
No entry without protein recycling: Researchers discover new coherence in enzyme transport
The group of Prof. Dr. Ralf Erdmann at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany, discovered a connection of peroxisomal protein import and receptor export. In the Journal of Biological Chemistry, they disclo ...
16 hours ago |
not rated yet |
0
Under the microscope #7
In this video Dr Ingrid Graz shows us a thin layer of gold on top of rubber. Cracks in the gold allow it to stretch and we can use this for stretchable electronics.
18 hours ago |
not rated yet |
0
Anonymous knocks CIA website offline (Update)
The website of the Central Intelligence Agency was inaccessible on Friday after the hacker group Anonymous claimed to have knocked it offline.
New error-correcting codes guarantee the fastest possible rate of data transmission
Error-correcting codes are one of the triumphs of the digital age. Theyre a way of encoding information so that it can be transmitted across a communication channel such as an optical fiber o ...
Google users warned of threat to smartphone wallets
Users of Google smartphone wallets were being warned on Friday that there is a way to crack pass codes intended to thwart thieves from going on illicit shopping sprees.
Humans may have helped the decline of African rainforests 3000 years ago
(PhysOrg.com) -- Large areas of rainforests in Central Africa mysteriously disappeared over three thousand years ago, to be replaced by savannas. The prevailing theory has been that the cause was a change ...
New power source discovered
(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and RMIT University have made a breakthrough in energy storage and power generation.
Small modular reactor design could be a 'SUPERSTAR'
(PhysOrg.com) -- Though most of today's nuclear reactors are cooled by water, we've long known that there are alternatives; in fact, the world's first nuclear-powered electricity in 1951 came from a reactor ...
Aug 03, 2008
Rank: not rated yet
Therefore, it will be easy to formulate a paint with the antimicrobial compounds that can turn any surface into an environment hostile to microbes.