Post-operatory infections in orthopedic surgeries pose a significant risk. The common approach of using antibiotics, both parenterally or embedded in bone cement (when this is employed during surgery) faces the challenge of the rising population of pathogens exhibiting resistance properties against one or more of these compounds; therefore, novel approaches need to be developed. Silver nanoparticles appear to be an exciting prospect because of their antimicrobial activity and safety at the levels used in medical applications. In this paper, a novel type of silver nanoparticles capped with tiopronin is presented. Two ratios of reagents during synthesis were tested and the effect on the nanoparticles investigated through TEM, TGA, and UV-Vis spectroscopy. Once encapsulated in bone cement, only the nanoparticles with the highest amount of inorganic fraction conferred antimicrobial activity against methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) at concentrations as low as 0.1% w/w. No other characteristics of the bone cement, such as cytotoxicity or mechanical properties, were affected by the presence of the nanoparticles. Our work presents a new type of silver nanoparticles and demonstrates that they can be embedded in bone cement to prevent infections once the synthetic conditions are tailored for such applications.

A simple chemical route to fabricating highly linear, well‐aligned and unbranched one‐dimensional arrays of silver nanoparticles with ultra‐high aspect ratios is demonstrated. Starting with a polydisperse nanoparticle material, the application of ultrasound was found to promote digestive ripening and induce a thiolate‐driven self‐assembly process. The assembly method discovered has been extended to other systems, with initial findings showing the successful templating of gold nanoparticles into chains using Cu(I)‐thiolates. This opens the possibility of a generic route which can be applied to many nanoparticle systems.

Oxidative addition of B−halogen bonds to Pt(0) centers generally leads to corresponding trans-halo(boryl)complexes. Here, we report on a series of unprecedented cis-bromo(boryl)species of the type cis-[(dcpe)Pt{B(Br)R)(Br)], which were obtained from corresponding complexes trans-[(Cy3P)2Pt{B(Br)R}(Br)] (R = Fc, Pip, Mes) (Cy = cyclohexyl; Fc = ferroceny; Pip = piperidyl, Mes = mesityl) upon treatment with the chelating bisphosphine dcpe (=bis(dicyclohexyl)phosphinoethane). In CH2Cl2 solution and in the presence of PCy3, one of these products, cis-[(dcpe)Pt{B(Br)Mes)(Br)], is converted into the corresponding chloroboryl complex cis-[(dcpe)Pt{B(Cl)Mes)(Br)]. All compounds were fully characterized by multinuclear NMR spectroscopy and single-crystal X-ray analyses.

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