Huang Qing group of Institute of technology and biology of Chinese Academy of Sciences and Wang Qi group of Institute of plasma found that low temperature plasma treatment of graphene oxide can significantly improve its antibacterial and sterilization ability

Graphene, as a new two-dimensional carbon material, has shown great application prospects in many biomedical fields However, compared with antibiotics, silver and other traditional sterilization drugs / materials, the general graphene materials have weak sterilization ability In order to improve its sterilization ability, it is usually done to connect other materials with strong antibacterial ability through chemical means on graphene materials However, the chemical treatment process is complex and may cause environmental and health risks Recently, Huang Qing group and Wang Qi group of the Institute of plasma used low-temperature plasma to treat graphene oxide, and found that the sterilization ability of the treated graphene oxide was significantly improved AFM, Raman (spectral and I d / Ig imaging) and XPS characterization of graphene oxide before (a, C, e, h, J) and after (B, D, F, I, K) plasma treatment source: Applied Physics Letters yellow blue, etc used low-temperature plasma treatment of graphene oxide and studied its sterilization effect, They found that at the concentration of 0.02mg/ml, graphene oxide treated by hydrogen plasma can inactivate nearly 90% of bacteria, which is much higher than that of untreated graphene oxide In order to find out the reason, the graphene oxide before and after treatment was characterized by atomic force microscopy (AFM), Raman spectroscopy, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) They found that plasma treatment can not only effectively reduce the size of graphene, but also lead to the increase of defects on the surface of graphene oxide, forming a number of irregular columnar or needle like protrusions, leading to the leakage of cell contents and bacterial death This study shows that low temperature plasma can be used as an effective physical treatment method to modify graphene materials and improve their antibacterial ability Comparison of sterilization capacity of graphene oxide before and after plasma treatment (Fig B processing time is 4 hours) source: the above work of Applied Physics Letters is supported by key research and development plan of Anhui Province, National Natural Science Foundation, Anhui Natural Science Foundation and youth Promotion Association of Chinese Academy of Sciences Relevant results have been published online in Applied Physics letter Paper link: http://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.5012132 brief introduction of researcher Huang Qing: http://sourcedb.hf.cas.cn/zw/rck/200907/t20090727_.html brief introduction of researcher Wang Qi: http:// Doctor Wang Qi