DEVELOPMENT OF NOVEL ANTIBACTERIAL MATERIALS BASED ON MODIFIED CELLULOSE

Abstract

The inhibition of pathogenic bacterial growth is essential for many practical applications such as drug delivery systems, textiles, medical devices and food industries. The contact-based bactericidal textiles are generally made of conjugated synthetic antimicrobial peptides. In this research, contact-active antimicrobial surfaces were synthesized by introducing short peptides (RIGRR) onto the cotton surfaces through covalent conjugation. Further modifications were performed with the attachment of aliphatic acids with different lengths (C4, C6, C10, C12, C16, and C18) to increase the hydrophobicity via the SPOT method and standard Fmoc chemistry. The peptide-immobilized cotton fabrics were further characterized by UV-Visible spectrophotometry, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and MALDI-TOF Mass spectrometry. The functionalized cotton fabrics were evaluated for their antibacterial activity by colony counting method (JIS L 1902) against Gram-positive bacterium (Staphylococcus aureus-ATTC 6538P), and Gram-negative bacteria (Escherichia coli-ATCC 8739, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa-ATTC 9027). The results showed that the short peptide-immobilized cotton fabrics exhibited higher antibacterial activity in Gram-negative bacteria. Moreover, evaluation of the biocompatibility of the short peptide-immobilized cotton fabrics indicated that the materials were non-toxic to mouse fibroblasts (L929) cell.