Bio-conjugated popcorn shaped gold nanoparticles for targeted photothermal killing of multiple drug resistant Salmonella DT104

Multiple drug resistant Salmonella enterica serover Typhimurium definitive type 104 (DT104) is at present an emerging threat worldwide. Outbreak of food poisoning by MDRB Salmonella is very common in USA and other countries. As a result, new approaches for the treatment of infectious bacterial pathogens that do not rely on traditional therapeutic regimes are very urgent in today's world. Driven by this need, in this manuscript, we report a monoclonal antibody-conjugated popcorn shaped gold nanomaterial driven approach to selectively destroy ampicillin, chloramphenicol, streptomycin, sulfonamides, and tetracycline drug resistant Salmonella typhimurium DT104 bacteria. Our result shows that when antibody modified popcorn shaped gold nanoparticle conjugated bacteria sample was exposed to 670 nm laser radiation, almost 100% of drug resistant bacteria were killed due to photothermal lysis. We demonstrate that our gold nanotechnology based assay is capable of destroying MDRB in food samples.