Interaction of copper oxide nanoparticles with bacterial nucleic acids: a mini-review

Despite the wide use of conventional antibiotics to treat bacterial infections, bacteria have now become resistant to many antibiotics and other antibacterial agents. This resistance is heritable and allows the spread of intractable bacterial infections, which is one of the biggest health challenges encountered around the world. This issue has led to the search for new therapeutic antibacterial agents. In the last few decades, nanomaterials, especially metal and metal oxide nanoparticles (NPs), have gained much attention due to their advantageous properties, including large surface-to-volume ratio and high antimicrobial activity. Among various metal and metal oxide NPs, copper oxide NPs have been particularly investigated owing to their biocompatibility and antibacterial activity against both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. Several antibacterial mechanisms have been proposed for copper oxide NPs, among which their interaction with bacterial deoxyribonucleic acid and ribonucleic acid is considered important. These NPs can disrupt the accuracy of DNA replication by changing the DNA sequence which result in differences in the target sequences bound by random amplification of polymorphic DNA (RAPD) primers. This mini-review discusses this interaction according to recent studies.