In-vitro synergistic microbicidal and catalytic evaluation of polyvinylpyrrolidone/chitosan doped tungsten trioxide nanoplates with evidential in-silico analysis
Ehtisham Umar, Ali Haider, Iram Shahzadi, Anwar Ul‐Hamid, Hameed Ullah, Sherdil Khan, Muhammad Ikram
Abstract
In this research, hydrothermally synthesized tungsten trioxide (WO 3 ) nanocomposites doped polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) and chitosan (CS) were studied. Various concentrations (3, 6, and 9 wt%) of PVP were doped into a fixed amount of binary system (CS-WO 3 ) nanocomposites. PVP/CS polymers showed attractive attention because of their different structure, functionality, and architecture control as dopant to WO 3 . The PVP/CS encapsulates the WO 3 (ternary composite), which controls crystallite size (band gap reduction), rapidly overcomes the recombination electron-hole pairs issues, and generates the active sites, resulting in improved catalytic and antimicrobial activity. The synthesized nanocomposites revealed significant catalytic efficiency and methylene blue (MB) dye depletion of 99.9 % in the presence of reducing agent (NaBH 4 ) in neutral and acidic media. Antimicrobial effectiveness of produced nanostructures towards Escherichia coli ( E. coli ) pathogen at low and high concentrations were investigated by Vernier caliper in mm. Furthermore, to their microbicidal action, docking experiments of CS-doped WO 3 and PVP/CS-doped WO 3 nanostructures for DHFR and FabI of Escherichia coli suggested blockage of aforesaid enzymes as the plausible pathway.