Indian Journal of Comparative Microbiology, Immunology and Infectious Diseases

With rise in the use of antibiotics, microbes have evolved to develop various mechanisms to resist their action. The need of the hour is to develop alternate strategies to combat antimicrobial resistance. Inorganic metal/metal oxide nanoparticles (NPs) have recently attracted attention of researchers because of their versatile applications in diverse fields. The nanomaterials act as suitable carriers for antibiotics and prevent their degradation; act as outer membrane permeabilisers to let the metal-based NPs to reach their target and inhibit expulsion of antibiotics and thereby able to reverse the antibacterial resistance caused by antibiotics. Metal NPs are comparatively advantageous as the active antimicrobial agents because of their nano size and greater surface area to size ratio, and hence they can easily penetrate the biofilm and damage/kill the bacteria. Metallic NPs can be utilized not only as an alternative to antibiotics, but also for delivery of antibiotics as an antibiotic-metallic complex, for surface modification, functionalization, and controllable hydrophobicity/lipophilicity, which enable the antibiotic-loaded NPs to target specific biological sites and to reduce antibacterial resistance. In this review, we highlight different mechanisms of antimicrobial resistance and strategies to combat this resistance using metallic NPs.