Evaluation of the Antimicrobial Activity of Silver Nanoparticles on Antibiotic-Resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Antimicrobial resistance is one of the major characteristics of infectious agents. Silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) have been introduced as novel antibacterial agents in accordance with the traditional treatments. Our purpose of this study was to evaluate the antimicrobial activity of AgNPs on the Pseudomonas aeruginosa (P. aeruginosa) that are resistant to antibiotics.
During a cross-sectional study, we tried to evaluate 20 strains of P. aeruginosa isolated from the urine cultures of patients admitted to the hospital due to urinary tract infections. The AgNPs were commercially purchased. The minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of AgNPs in different concentrations was determined by the dilution in wells on bacteria. The antibiotic susceptibility pattern of P. aeruginosa was evaluated by the Kirby-Bauer disk diffusion standard.
Current study indicated that P. aeruginosa were resistant to four types of agents including ampicillin (85%), nitrofurantoin (65%), nalidixic acid (65%), and ciprofloxacin (15%) and result of nanosilver indicated that the most MIC was 100 ppm concentration, and six strains of P. aeruginosa were inhibited by it.
Our study presented a new type of silver nanoparticle and indicated that they can be embedded in bone cement to prevent infections once synthetic conditions are tailored for such applications.