{"doi":"10.3390/nano10112294","title":"Highly Efficient Antimicrobial Activity of CuxFeyOz Nanoparticles against Important Human Pathogens","abstract":"The development of innovative antimicrobial materials is crucial in thwarting infectious diseases caused by microbes, as drug-resistant pathogens are increasing in both number and capacity to detoxify the antimicrobial drugs used today. An ideal antimicrobial material should inhibit a wide variety of bacteria in a short period of time, be less or not toxic to normal cells, and the fabrication or synthesis process should be cheap and easy. We report a one-step microwave-assisted hydrothermal synthesis of mixed composite CuxFeyOz (Fe2O3/Cu2O/CuO/CuFe2O) nanoparticles (NPs) as an excellent antimicrobial material. The 1 mg/mL CuxFeyOz NPs with the composition 36% CuFeO2, 28% Cu2O and 36% Fe2O3 have a general antimicrobial activity greater than 5 log reduction within 4 h against nine important human pathogenic bacteria (including drug-resistant bacteria as well as Gram-positive and Gram-negative strains). For example, they induced a >9 log reduction in Escherichia coli B viability after 15 min of incubation, and an ~8 log reduction in multidrug-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae after 4 h incubation. Cytotoxicity tests against mouse fibroblast cells showed about 74% viability when exposed to 1 mg/mL CuxFeyOz NPs for 24 h, compared to the 20% viability for 1 mg/mL pure Cu2O NPs synthesized by the same method. These results show that the CuxFeyOz composite NPs are a highly efficient, low-toxicity and cheap antimicrobial material that has promising potential for applications in medical and food safety.","journal":"Nanomaterials","year":2020,"id":88572,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":10,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9542,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":450145,"name":"D.W. Pearson","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":449049,"name":"Stéphane L. Benoit","orcid":"0000-0002-9314-8586","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":449050,"name":"Jing Xie","orcid":"0009-0008-6033-8667","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":449051,"name":"Jitendra Pant","orcid":"0000-0003-0514-0347","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":449052,"name":"Yanjun Yang","orcid":"0000-0002-1822-7364","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":449053,"name":"Arnab Mondal","orcid":"0000-0001-8916-2468","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":298473,"name":"Hitesh Handa","orcid":"0000-0002-9369-7374","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":449054,"name":"Jane Y. Howe","orcid":"0000-0001-9319-3988","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":449055,"name":"Yen‐Con Hung","orcid":"0000-0003-0030-7363","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":449056,"name":"Jorge E. Vidal","orcid":"0000-0003-0573-5658","position":10,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":449057,"name":"Robert J. Maier","orcid":"0000-0002-1281-2554","position":11,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":449058,"name":"Yiping Zhao","orcid":"0000-0002-3710-4159","position":12,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":449048,"name":"Lu Zhu","orcid":"0000-0001-5588-7540","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":66,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T22:01:22.387926Z","pmid":"33233512","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}