Superbug And Quantum Dot

Science Affairs Nanotechnology

Quantum dot could be a new way to tackle so-called superbugs. The quantum dots were successful in killing 92 percent of drug-resistant lab-grown bacterial cells.
The quantum dots are inactive in the dark and active on command via light exposure. This enables scientists to adjust the wavelength to kill the affected cells.
These dots are made of semiconducting materials like cadmium telluride instead of metal. They can be tailored to specific infections, slipping inside the disease-causing germ to destroy them without any side effects.
Previous efforts to thwart superbugs have largely failed, due to the bacteria's ability to rapidly adapt and develop immunity to antibiotics such as penicillin.

About AMR and Superbug:

AMR (Antimicrobial Resistance) occurs when microbes evolve defensive mechanisms designed to evade therapeutic agents, thus rendering these drugs partly or completely ineffective as forms of treatment.
Largely due to the oversubscription of antibiotics to people and their overuse within intensive livestock farming, the situation has led many to suspect that we are entering a post-antibiotic era.
Not only does this make once-treatable infections far more difficult to treat, it also means that they could potentially become life threatening. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) had become a global health security threat. Various “superbugs” are evolving too rapidly to be counteracted by traditional drugs

About quantum dot:

Nanoparticles of semiconductors (quantum dots) were theorized in the 1970s and initially created in the early 1980s. If semiconductor particles are made small enough, quantum effects come into play, which limit the energies at which electrons and holes (the absence of an electron) can exist in the particles.
As energy is related to wavelength (or colour), this means that the optical properties of the particle can be finely tuned depending on its size. Thus, particles can be made to emit or absorb specific wavelengths (colours) of light, merely by controlling their size.

Applications Of Quantum Dots:

Using magnetic quantum dots in spintronic semiconductor devices such as memory chips. Spintronic devices are expected to be significantly higher density and lower power consumption because they measure the spin of electronics to determine a 1 or 0, rather than measuring groups of electronics as done in current semiconductor devices.
Researchers are developing humidity and pressure sensors using graphene quantum dots.
Quantum Dots can be used for producing images of cancer tumors.
Used in solar cell that uses a copper indium selenide sulfide quantum dots. Unlike quantum dots containing lead or cadium the copper based quantum dot is non-toxic as well as low cost.

Analysis:

There is the rise of super-bacteria resistant to the latest antibiotics, the last line of medical defense against various infections, cancer and HIV. The rampant, indiscriminate administration of common antibiotics—penicillin is a prime example—has allowed bacteria such as Salmonella, Staphylococcus and E. coli the ability to shuffle their genes and defeat these drugs. For humanity, it’s always been a one-step-ahead-many-steps-back battle in the war against the superbugs, which use evolutionary abilities to overwhelm medical advances.
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria infect about two million people and kill at least 23,000 people in the US each year. There is no comparative data for India, but the country is the world’s largest consumer of antibiotics and has emerged as a leading hotbed of untreatable bacterial infections
This could offer some hope, showing that tiny structures called nanoparticles can be turned into targeted, destructive weapons that can destroy resistant bacteria by using nothing more than light

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