During implant surgeries, antibacterial agents are needed to prevent bacterial infections, which can cause the formation of biofilms between implanted materials and tissue. Mussel adhesive proteins (MAPs) derived from marine mussels are bioadhesives that show strong adhesion and coating ability on various surfaces even in wet environment. Here, we proposed a novel surface-independent antibacterial coating strategy based on the fusion of MAP to a silver-binding peptide, which can synthesize silver nanoparticles having broad antibacterial activity. This sticky recombinant fusion protein enabled the efficient coating on target surface and the easy generation of silver nanoparticles on the coated-surface under mild condition. The biosynthesized silver nanoparticles showed excellent antibacterial efficacy against both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria and also revealed good cytocompatibility with mammalian cells. In this coating strategy, MAP-silver binding peptide fusion proteins provide hybrid environment incorporating inorganic silver nanoparticle and simultaneously mediate the interaction of silver nanoparticle with surroundings. Moreover, the silver nanoparticles were fully synthesized on various surfaces including metal, plastic, and glass by a simple, surface-independent coating manner, and they were also successfully synthesized on a nanofiber surface fabricated by electrospinning of the fusion protein. Thus, this facile surface-independent silver nanoparticle-generating antibacterial coating has great potential to be used for the prevention of bacterial infection in diverse biomedical fields.

We report a facile and sensitive analytical method for the detection of pathogenic bacteria. Salmonella bacteria in milk were captured by antibody-conjugated magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) and separated from analyte samples by applying an external magnetic field. The MNP-Salmonella complexes were re-dispersed in a buffer solution then exposed to antibody-immobilized TiO(2) nanocrystals (TNs), which absorb UV light. After magnetically separating the MNP-Salmonella-TN complexes from solution, the UV-Vis absorption spectrum of the unbound TN solution was obtained. Because the light absorption intensity was reversely proportional to the Salmonella concentration, the assay exhibited high sensitivity toward low concentrations of Salmonella bacteria. The detection limit of Salmonella in milk was found to be more than 100 cfu mL(-1).

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For the rapid multiplex analysis of pathogens, 16S rRNAs from cell lysates were directly applied onto a DNA microarray at room temperature (RT) for RNA-DNA hybridization. To eliminate the labeling step, seven fluorescent-labeled detector probes were cohybridized with 16S rRNA targets and adjacent specific capture probes. We found that eight pathogens were successfully discriminated by the 16S rRNA-based direct method, which showed greater specificity than the polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-labeled method due to chaperone and distance effects. A new specificity criterion for a perfect match between RNA and DNA was suggested to be 21-41% dissimilarity using correlation analysis between the mismatch and the sequence according to the guanine-cytosine (GC) percentage or the distribution of mismatches. Six categories of food matrix (egg, meat, milk, rice, vegetable, and mixed) were also tested, and the target pathogen was successfully discriminated within statistically significant levels. Finally, we found that the intrinsic abundance of 16S rRNA molecules successfully substituted PCR-based amplification with a low limit of detection of 10-10(3) cells mL(-1) and a high quantitative linear correlation. Collectively, our suggested 16S rRNA-based direct method enables the highly sensitive, specific, and quantitative analysis of selected pathogens at RT within 2 h, even in food samples.

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