On the synergy between silver nanoparticles and doxycycline towards the inhibition of Staphylococcus aureus growth

Heloiza F O Silva; Rayane P de Lima; Fernanda S L da Costa; Edgar P Moraes; Maria C N Melo; Celso Sant'Anna; Mateus Eugênio; Luiz H S Gasparotto

doi:10.1039/c8ra02176g

On the synergy between silver nanoparticles and doxycycline towards the inhibition of Staphylococcus aureus growth

RSC Adv. 2018 Jun 28;8(42):23578-23584. doi: 10.1039/c8ra02176g. eCollection 2018 Jun 27.

Authors

Heloiza F O Silva¹, Rayane P de Lima¹, Fernanda S L da Costa¹, Edgar P Moraes¹, Maria C N Melo², Celso Sant'Anna³, Mateus Eugênio³, Luiz H S Gasparotto¹

Affiliations

¹ Biological Chemistry and Chemometrics Research Group, Institute of Chemistry, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte Natal 59072-970 RN Brasil lhgasparotto@ufrnet.br +55 84 33422323.
² Laboratory of Medical Bacteriology, Center of Biosciences, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte Natal 59078-970 RN Brasil.
³ Laboratory of Biotechnology - Labio, National Institute of Metrology, Quality and Technology - Inmetro Duque de Caxias 25250-020 RJ Brazil.

Abstract

In a previous paper (RSC Adv., 2015, 5, 66886-66893), we showed that the combination of silver nanoparticles (NanoAg) with doxycycline (DO) culminated in an increased bactericidal activity towards E. coli. Herein we further investigated the metabolic changes that occurred on Staphylococcus aureus upon exposure to NanoAg with the help of attenuated total reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) coupled with multivariate data analysis. It has been discovered that the combination of DO with NanoAg produced metabolic changes in S. aureus that were not simply the overlap of the treatments with DO and NanoAg separately. Our results suggest that DO and NanoAg act synergistically to impede protein synthesis by the bacteria.