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Updated: Jul 16, 2025
Visualization of Bacterial Resistance using Fluorescent Antibiotic Probes
Published on: March 2, 2020
A fluorescent quaternary phosphonium main-chain-type polymer: an opportunity to fabricate functional materials with
Jiawei Lv1, Saicuo Wang2, Chunxuan Qi3
1Key Laboratory of Polymer Materials of Gansu Province, Key Laboratory of Eco-Environment-Related Polymer Materials Ministry of Education, College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Northwest Normal University, Lanzhou 730070, P. R. China. mahczju@hotmail.com.
Abstract:
The large-scale transmission and infection of pathogens worldwide have encouraged scientists to develop new antibacterial agents that do not succumb to bacterial resistance, which is not only of significant research interest but also challenging. In this work, we fabricated two main-chain (MC)-type cationic polymers (TPE-ammonium polymer and TPE-phosphonium polymer) through a one-step 100% atomic economic reaction. The two polymers demonstrated very promising antibacterial activity and their minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC) values are lower than that of most previously reported antibacterial agents. Especially, the phosphonium-doped MC polymer exhibited very small MICs of 0.24 and 0.98 μg mL-1 against S. aureus and E. coli, respectively. This excellent antibacterial performance by the TPE-phosphonium polymer is attributed to the advantages of the MC-type polymer such as its large molecular weight (Mn = 103 011) and stronger polarization effect from the P atom. More impressively, depending on the typical aggregation-induced emission (AIE) property and excellent antibacterial behaviors, the TPE-phosphonium polymer was successfully used for bacterial imaging and real-time monitoring of bacterial viability.
