“…Some of these smaller-sized metal elements can pass through the cell membrane and act on the cytoplasm, damaging the bacterial DNA and proteins. Many metallic materials [metallic nanoparticles such as silver (Song et al, 2021;Mojally et al, 2022;Qi et al, 2022;Ke et al, 2023), gold (Qin et al, 2023), cerium oxide (Kalantari et al, 2020), and zinc oxide (Khorasani et al, 2018;Raafat et al, 2018), as well as metal ions such as Cu 2+ (Xia et al, 2022;Xia et al, 2022), Fe 3+ (Qi et al, 2022), Al 3+ (Li et al, 2022b;, and Mg 2+ (Eivazzadeh-Keihan et al, 2020;Albalwi et al, 2022)] have been successfully loaded into PVA-based hydrogels with good antibacterial effects. The third uses the photothermal effect the photothermal agent produces under NIR excitation-photothermal therapy; the principle is that during NIR irradiation, the photothermal agent generates heat, causing a local high temperature and irreversible damage to microorganism protein and enzymes, thus achieving sterilization (Su et al, 2023) (Figure 8A).…”