Nanomaterial-Based Antibacterial Paper

Antibacterial materials are widely used in everyday life and plays important roles in the public health system. There are a wide range of materials that have been known to prevent attachment and proliferation of microbes on material surfaces. These include antibiotics, metal ions and quaternary ammonium compounds. Given the availability of these various antibacterial materials, concerns about antibiotics-resistance, environmental pollution, relatively complex processing and high cost have been of much recent interest. Antimicrobial properties of nanomaterials have been explored to meet these challenges. Various nanomaterials including silver nanoparticles (AgNPs), titanium oxide nanoparticles and carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have been found to be highly effective bacterial-killing materials. The most well-known examples are silver and silver-based compounds, which were well known to be antiseptic to a spectrum of bacterium even in ancient times. AgNPs have proven to possess high antibacterial activity with minimal perturbation to human cells. Consequently, widespread applications of AgNPs have been found in medical and environmental areas [1]. More recently, carbon nanomaterials have emerged as a type of novel antibacterial nanomaterials, including CNTs and graphene. In this chapter, we aim to provide a review on the fabrication of nanomaterials-based paper-like films and their antibacterial applications.