Jornal de Nanomedicina e Nanotecnologia

Abstrato

Dendrimeric Biocides - A Tool for Effective Antimicrobial Therapy

Karthikeyan R

Agents that are capable of killing pathogenic microorganisms are known as Antimicrobial Substances. These are of low molecular weight and used for the sterilization of water, as antimicrobial drugs, as food preservatives, and for soil sterilization. Due to their potential to provide quality and safety benefits to many materials antimicrobials gain interest from both industry and academic research. However, antimicrobial agents with low molecular weight suffer from many disadvantages, such as the antimicrobial ability to short-term and environment toxicity. Antimicrobial functional groups can be introduced into polymer molecules to overcome problems associated with the low molecular weight antimicrobial agents. For enhancing the efficacy of some existing antimicrobial agents, selectivity, increasing their efficiency and prolonging the lifetime of the antimicrobial agents the use of antimicrobial polymers can be employed. The development of antimicrobial polymers research represents a great a challenge for both the academic world and industry. The polymer research that presents great modern interest, yet has received lacking consideration, is that of the development of polymers with antimicrobial activities, commonly known as polymeric biocides. Biocides immobilized on dendrimers can be more effective if the target sites are cell walls or membranes. It has been shown that small quaternary ammonium compounds exert their antimicrobial action by disintegrating and disrupting the cell membrane, converting functional end groups of dendrimer to ammonium salts, dendrimer biocides can be synthesized. These dendrimer biocides have been shown to be more potent than their small molecule counterparts as they bear high local density active groups. Thus, dendrimer biocides may be very beneficial in terms of activity, reduced toxicity, localization in specific organs and increased duration of action. This chapter will find complete solution for an antimicrobial agent facing problems and advantages of the dendrimeric biocides.