Advances in Antimicrobial and Antiviral Nanoparticles 

Dear Colleagues,

Nanostructures or nanoparticles (NPs) are increasingly applied to target microorganisms as an alternative to traditional antibiotics. Nanotechnology may be particularly advantageous for treating bacterial/fungal infections and infections caused by protists or viruses. Examples of this nanotechnology include NPs in antimicrobial coatings for medicinal materials, antimicrobial vaccines, and implantable devices to prevent infection and promote wound healing. This also holds for antibiotic delivery systems used to treat infectious disease. At the same time, microbial diagnosis can be applied in systems for microbial detection. The antimicrobial mechanisms of NPs are poorly understood at the molecular level – this holds for clinical pathogens as well as expatriated pathogens in environmental settings or microbes that remediate antimicrobials. Currently, better-investigated toxicity mechanisms include the induction of oxidative stress as well as non-oxidative mechanisms and metal-ion release. Multiple simultaneous antimicrobial mechanisms are hypothesized for different NPs, such as those that induce adverse mutations or cause drug resistance, affect efflux pumps, induce apoptosis, or affect antioxidant systems or mitochondrial function. We assume that it is difficult for microbes to develop resistance against NPs and envision that nano-based antimicrobials have substantial potential. In this Special Issue, we welcome contributions on the antimicrobial mechanisms of NPs against microorganisms, in particular those involving molecular aspects. These contributions should address the gaps in research knowledge, the limitations of current research, and the discovery of promising novel future approaches to synthesis, characterization, clinical and environmental sciences, and modes of antimicrobial action of inorganic, organic and biogenic NPs for sustainability applications.

Prof. Dr. Jiang Shiou Hwang
Prof. Dr. Hans-Uwe Dahms
Guest Editors

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