Carbon nanostructures with antibacterial and wound healing activities: Recent progress and challenges

Abstract

The presence of pathogenic bacteria in the environment represents a significant public health problem. Importantly, it is necessary to propose and implement alternative antibacterial approaches to existing antibiotics because of high resistance of bacterial species to antibiotics. Recent years, carbon-based nanomaterials (e.g., graphene, graphene oxide (GO), reduced graphene oxide (rGO), graphene quantum dots (GQDs), carbon nanotubes (CNTs), carbon quantum dots (CQDs), fullerenes, nanodiamonds, among others) have gained great attention from researchers, owing to their outstanding physicochemical properties and advantageous features such as uniqueness of optical properties, high biocompatibility, environmentally friendly, inexpensive, good stability, mobility of electrons, and variety of functional groups (e.g., hydroxyl, amino, carboxyl). They have been intensively applied in antibacterial and wound healing areas. For this reason, the present review will focus on the synthesis approaches of carbon-based nanomaterials and their characterization by various analytical techniques. Further, mechanistic insights of carbon-based nanomaterials in antibacterial and wound healing properties, have also been summarized and discussed. Moreover, issues and current challenges of the carbon-based nanomaterials were analyzed for their further development.