Antimicrobial and cytotoxicity activities of ferrites

Abstract

Antibiotic drug resistance of pathogens is recognized as serious health concerns across the globe. On an account of the available study opine antibiotics cannot always the answer. Realizing this fact there is immense pressure on researchers for searching novel approaches. In modern medical sciences, nanotechnology established as fascinating field to develop a novel nanomaterials at lower cost. High surface area-to-volume ratio and unique physicochemical properties of nanomaterials/nanoparticles (NPs) have made them promising antimicrobial agent. These properties grab attention as new effective means where antibiotics hold the prime importance. Moreover, nanofabrication processes provide excellent platform to obtain desired optoelectronic and physicochemical properties of NPs as they directly influence their efficacy and decide the fate of nanoparticles in commercial applications. Despite the formulation of unique nanomaterials, optimization of their efficiency and evaluation of cytotoxicity is important task before their practical usage. Over the past few years, a family ferrite NPs with various phases and morphologies as prominent materials in several biomedical applications including early detection of diseases, magnetically guided drug delivery, hyperthermia, magnetic resonance imaging, biosensing, biomolecule separation etc., is at the niche place. However, antimicrobial potential of ferrite NPs are scarcely been investigated. Thereby, in the present work synthesis of a range of ferrite NPs including MnF, NiF, CoF and ZnF NPs by a simple and cost-effective sol-gel auto-combustion method is explored and further envisaged in-vitro antibacterial activity against broad panel of pathogens by using agar well-diffusion technique. Subsequently, the as-synthesized ferrite NPs are initially characterized for their structure, morphology and elemental confirmation by means of various instrumental techniques. After analysis it was found that all ferrite NPs were newlinevii newlinepolycrystalline with sizes is less than 50 nm. Additiona