The newest warrior in the fight against antibiotic resistance may come with a copper shield. A team of nanotechnologists have developed a copper-based substance that kills more than 99.99% of bacteria on it within a couple of minutes.
Copper has long been known for its antimicrobial properties – it’s been used in water purification and wound sterilisation because it can kill bacteria. But it’s usually fairly slow-acting: an ordinary copper surface can kill around 97% of Staphylococcus aureus (golden staph) in roughly four hours.
This new copper surface, described in a paper in Biomaterials, can kill more than 99.99% of the same bacteria within two minutes, which means it could be highly effective against strains of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics.
The material is made by alloying copper and manganese together, and then removing 99% of the manganese atoms in a process called dealloying.
Co-author Professor Ma Qian, a researcher in advanced manufacturing and materials at RMIT University, says that there are at least two reasons their material is so dangerous to microbes.
The first is because of its ‘micro-nano’ structure – that is, the shapes it takes on the scale of both micrometres and nanometres. (For context, golden staph bacterial cells are around one micrometre – 1000 nanometres – long, while copper ions are each roughly 0.1 nanometres in radius.)
“[At the microscale] It has comb-like peaks, and within the tooth of each comb, there are nanoscale small...
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