Edible mushroom extract engineered Ag NPs as safe antimicrobial and antioxidant agents with no significant cytotoxicity on human dermal fibroblast cells

This study aims to develop a novel biomaterial to combat microbial infections and oxidative stress without any adverse effects. Accordingly, a facile, eco-friendly, stable in time and non-toxic silver nanoparticles (Ag NPs) was synthesized using the extract of edible mushroom, Agaricus bisporus. The myco-synthesized Ag NPs were characterized by UV-Visible spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction (XRD), High-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HR-TEM), Energy dispersive X-ray (EDX), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), dynamic light scattering (DLS) and Zeta potential. Ag NPs formation was confirmed by the appearance of brown colour due to surface plasmon resonance (SPR) effect. UV-Vis spectroscopy exhibited a sharp absorbance peak at 430 nm. XRD reflected the presence of diffraction peaks at (1 1 1), (200), (220) and (311) planes of face centred cubic (fcc) of Ag NPs. HR-TEM have shown the presence of spherical shaped particles with an average size of 16 nm. EDX spectrum for myco-synthesized Ag NPs recorded strong major intense signal at 0.3 keV and 3 keV confirming the presence of pure silver in the prepared Ag NPs. In antibacterial assay, the myco-synthesized Ag NPs have shown inhibition size against six selected human pathogens viz., Streptococcus pyogenes (17.36 +/- 0.45 mm), Staphylococcus aureus (18.00 +/-; 0.33 mm), Klebsiella pneumoniae (16.84 +/-; 0.4 mm), Shigella flexneri (18.67 +/- 0.66 mm), Candida albicans (19.00 +/- 0.66 mm) and Aspergillus fumigatus (18.48 +/- 0.53 mm). The myco-synthesized Ag NPs exhibited DPPH free radical scavenging activity and inhibited the free radicals up to 76.17 +/- 0.01% with an IC50 value of 12.5 mu g mL(-1). No significant toxicity of myco-synthesized Ag NPs on normal human dermal fibroblast cells were noticed (87.2 +/- 0.01% at 100 mu g mL(-1)). The present work concludes that myco-fabricated Ag NPs could be used as a potential drug to control microbial infections of skin without causing any adverse effects on normal cells.

Automated summary

This study successfully synthesized non-toxic, eco-friendly, and stable silver nanoparticles, which exhibited inhibitory effects against six human pathogens and strong free radical scavenging activity without significant toxicity to normal cells.