Ultrafine silver nanoparticles with excellent antibacterial efficacy prepared by a handover of vesicle templating to micelle stabilization

We report a role-switching method for preparing ultrafine water-dispersible silver nanoparticles with long-term stability based on a soft deformable block copolymer vesicle. Those ultrafine silver nanoparticles showed excellent antibacterial efficacy against both Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria with quite low minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) of 16.9 mu g mL(-1) and 8.45 mu g mL(-1), respectively.