Antimicrobial and Cytotoxic Properties of Silver Nanoparticles

Dear Colleagues,

Silver treatment of some types of infections has been used from long ago before the antibiotics era. However the discovery of these substances, able to kill pathogens in a targeted way, made obsolete the use of silver. However, the "silent pandemic" of antibiotics resistance, responsible for many deaths each year has made mandatory to look for new antimicrobials or new approaches for fighting infections. Currently, the use of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) is being explored as an alternative for some infections. Besides using these materials once infection is set, they can be used for preventing them, added to different materials, and in other applications with or without an antimicrobial goal. The increasing use of AgNPs is producing their spread in the environment, with effects still not well studied, but already known to be able even to modify biodiversity.

The use of AgNPs may have side effects in people or animals treated with them and in the environment and these effects should be analysed. Some reports, not much extended in the literature, indicate the cytotoxicity of some AgNPs. This is a handicap for the use of nanosilver as antimicrobials if the dose required for is cytotoxic. Different approaches are being developed to produce silver-based nanomaterials using chemical, physical or biological methods with different properties that eventually might generate materials with high antimicrobial activitiy/cytotoxicity ratios.

In the other hand, some nanosilver has been shown to be able to produce antiproliferative or toxic effects on cancer cells, and in this case its use as anticancer drugs is promising, but more studies are needed.

For this special issue we would like to invite researchers on silver nanoparticles to contribute their recent advances in the different aspects of their synthesis and aplications, particularly in the study of antimicrobial or anticancer activities and cytotoxic and environmental effects.

Prof. Dr. José Pascual Abad
Prof. Dr. Irma Marín
Guest Editors

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• silver nanoparticles
• antimicrobial activity
• silver nanoparticles citotoxicity
• silver nanoparticles genotoxicity
• anti-cancer silver
• green synthesis
• alternative antimicrobials
• silver environmental effects