Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-6-2017
Abstract
The global health threat of antimicrobial resistance has created a pressing need to develop practical alternatives to conventional antibiotic agents. Peptide mimetic synthetic amphiphilic polymers are known to non-specifically disrupt the bacterial cell surface thus leading to highly hindered bacterial resistance development. We investigated the antibacterial activities of a terpolymer macromolecular architecture with a combination of 6- carbon and 2-carbon spacer arms (distance from polymer backbone to pendent cationic center) interspersed with counits with hydrophobic side groups. A random copolymer with a combination of 6-carbon spacer arm repeat units (60 mol%) and 2-carbon spacer arm (40 mol%) units is moderately active against bacteria and shows very low hemolytic activity. Incorporation of comonomer units with alkyl side groups, by replacing different levels of 2-carbon spacer arm counit, led to substantial increments in antibacterial activities without detrimental effects on hemolytic activities leading to highly selective (bacteria over red blood cells) antibacterial activity. Time-kill studies revealed rapid bactericidal activity of the terpolymer against both Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli with 100% killing efficiency achieved within 1 h of polymer treatment, corresponding to a 5-log reduction of bacterial colony forming units. These results indicate the high potential of this amphiphilic terpolymer architecture in the development of alternatives to antibiotics.
Comments
This article was originally published in RSC Advances, available at DOI: 10.1039/c7ra00047b.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence.