Fabrication of multifunctional Guar gum-silver nanocomposite hydrogels for biomedical and environmental applications

Poly(acrylamide-co-acrylamidoglycolic acid)/guar gum@ Ag-nanocomposite (AgNC@PAAG) hydrogels has been fabricated by a green protocol utilizing rhubarb stem-extract as bioreductant. The prepared nanocomposites (NCs) are formulated by varying guar gum (GG) polymer and cross-linker content, and used remarkably to study the release of an anticancer drug, 5-fluorouracil (FU). The AgNC@PAAG has demonstrated its potential in bacterial inactivation and p-nitrophenol (PNP) reduction. The AgNC@PAAG hydrogels showed extended FU release time, which was up to 23 h in pH 7.4. The higher zone of inhibition was documented for AgNC@PAAG against B. subtilis and E. coli. It was noticed that, the inhibition activity of AgNC@PAAG, was directly proportional to cross-linker content than the GG polymer. The efficiency of AgNC@PAAG as a nanocatalyst was evaluated for a model reduction reaction of p-nitrophenol (PNP) reduction by aqueous sodium borohydride (NaBH₄), with an apparent rate constant of 121.8 × 10^-3 min^-1 at ambient temperature. The proposed nanocatalysts are reliable and recyclable, demonstrated its catalytic recycle efficacy of 85% after the third successive run. These NCs robust its biological and catalytic activity after embedding silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) by the bioreduction process; these optimized nanocatalysts can be remarkably used in biomedical healthcare sectors and industrial catalysis.