a new nanobiotic: syntheaa new nanobiotic: synthesis and characterization of an albumin nanoparticle with intrinsic antibiotic activitysis and characterization of an albumin nanoparticle with intrinsic antibiotic activity

Background and objectives: with entering the “post-antibiotic era”, antibiotic resistance is one of the most important prob- lems in food security, health and medicine. invention of nanoparticles with intrinsic antimicrobial activity has been provided a new tool to combat the problem, including some metal nanoparticles. but protein nanoparticles have been often used as nano-carrier for antibiotic drugs, not for their own antibiotic activity. in this article we have fabricated a very small bsa-np without any chemical modification on bsa molecules showing antibacterial activity. materials and methods: bovine serum albumin nanoparticle (bsa-np) was synthesized using botton-up approach, by dissolution of bsa in urea-containing tris buffer for 60 min at 60°c. then, the bsa solution was dialyzed against distilled water in order to nanoparticle formation. the resulted bsa-np has been characterized by dynamic light scattering (dls), field emission surface electron microscopy (fesem), sds-page, fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ftir) and uv-spectrophotometery. minimum inhibitory concentration (mic) method was used for evaluation of antibacterial activity of bsa-np against staphylococcus aureus and pseudomonas aeruginosa. results: the results obtained by dls technique indicated that bsa molecules were self-assembled into small aggregates with a hydrodynamic diameter of 23.23 ± 2.1 nm. with a small polydispersity index (pdi=0.522), the nanoparticles had good spherical uniformity. the nanoparticles made from a single type of protein molecule (bsa) and have a relatively transparent appearance. the bsa-nps caused a decrease in cell growth of both p. aeruginosa and s. aureus. moreover, they had a bac- teriostatic effect on p. aeruginosa (mic=112×10-5 μm). conclusion: in this study, using a green synthesis method, we succeeded in synthesizing a very small uniform bsa nanopar- ticles without any chemical modification on bsa molecules. it also has bacteriostatic properties against p. aeruginosa. therefore, it is hypothesized that our bsa-nps may be effective as a new approach to combat antibiotic resistance.