Postgraduate Student Seminar - Antimicrobial Mechanisms of Metal Nanoparticles, Phytochemicals and Bacteriocins
Supporting the below United Nations Sustainable Development Goals:支持以下聯合國可持續發展目標：支持以下联合国可持续发展目标：
Despite all the awareness campaigns and the active recommended reduction in antibiotic prescriptions and use, antimicrobial resistance remains on the top ten global public threats for human health, food security, and development. As alternatives to antibiotics, we have analyzed in vitro and in vivo the mechanisms of antimicrobial action of gold nanoparticles, phytochemicals (e.g., thymol, farnesol) and bacteriocins (e.g., lysostaphin). Having some of those antimicrobial systems growth-independent and non-specific multiple bactericidal modes of action, mainly by membrane disruption and oxidative stress generation, the chances for bacteria to develop resistance might be minimized. We have evaluated the antimicrobial action of those systems against pathogenic resistant bacteria in their planktonic, sessile, and also when infecting intracellularly (e.g., small colony variants of Staphylococcus aureus) eukaryotic cells. Some of those systems are also validated using the excisional wound-splinting model in mice to evaluate their effectiveness when treating infected topical wounds.
Professor Manuel Arruebo is a Full Professor of the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Aragon Nanoscience Institute at the University of Zaragoza in Spain. He co-authored 185 scientific papers, including 4 book chapters. A number of those papers have been published in journals with a high-impact factor such as Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Catalysis, PNAS, Nature Protocols, Nano Today, Trends in Biotechnology, Biomaterials, Chemistry of Materials, Small, Hepatology, Advanced Functional Materials, among others and his h-index is 48 (Scopus), 53 (Google scholar). He is co-inventor of 7 patents issued to the University of Zaragoza and to several industrial partners. He has led or participated in 44 research projects and is the principal investigator in 12 of the projects. He was awarded in 2014 with a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant (selected from 3673 applicants from throughout Europe) with more than 1,5M€.