Wool/Acrylic Blended Fabrics as Next-Generation Photodynamic Antimicrobial Materials

The adoption of self-sterilizing materials to reduce infection transmission in hospitals and related healthcare facilities has been hampered by the availability of scalable, cost-effective, and potent antimicrobial textiles. Here, we investigated whether photodynamic materials comprising photosensitizer-embedded wool/acrylic blends were able to mediate the photodynamic inactivation of Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. A small library of wool/acrylic (W/A) blended fabrics was constructed wherein the wool fibers were embedded with rose Bengal (RB) as a photosensitizer and the acrylic fibers were dyed with a traditional cationic yellow X-8GL dye, thereby enabling a broader color palette than was achievable with a single photosensitizer. The resultant photodynamic materials were characterized by physical (SEM, DSC, TGA, tensile strength), spectroscopic (fluorescence), colorimetric (K/S and CIELab values), and color fastness (against rubbing, washing) studies, and their photooxidation of the model substrate potassium iodide demonstrated the ability of these materials to generate microbicidal reactive oxygen species (i.e., singlet oxygen) upon illumination. Our best results yielded the photodynamic inactivation of Gram-positive S. aureus (99.98%) and B. subtilis (99.993%) by ∼4 log units upon illumination with visible light (60 min; 65 ± 5 mW/cm²; λ ≥ 420 nm), although more modest activity was observed against Gram-negative P. aeruginosa and E. coli (1-2 log units pathogen reduction). While there were no statistically significant differences for dual-dyed materials that were produced through either sequential or simultaneous dyeing steps, it was noted that high loadings of the cationic yellow X-8GL dye did inhibit the antimicrobial activity of the RB photosensitizer, with the dual-dyed materials able to mediate a 2.9 log unit reduction against S. aureus at a 1% o.w.f X-8GL loading. These findings indicate that the antimicrobial photodynamic inactivation of dual-dyed materials is independent of the dyeing process itself, yet exhibits limitations on the loading of the traditional dye with regards to the activity of the photosensitizer. Taken together, the results suggest the feasibility of photosensitizer-embedded blended fabrics produced through a one-step dyeing process as a low-cost and scalable method for creating effective self-disinfecting textiles for infection prevention, and whose inclusion of a second traditional dye for color variation will further benefit their adoption from a commercial standpoint.