Resistance to antibiotics has become a serious public health problem. Hospital infections, prostheses or surgical implants that become infected and do not respond to treatment are a real challenge to the research community, which has been seeking alternatives for effectively eliminating these bacteria for years. In 2012 the researchers from the Department of Chemical Engineering of the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Vladimir Baulin and Sergey Pogodin, opened a line of research to develop antibacterial models that were inspired by insects. The wings of, for example, dragon flies are made up of complex structures of nanometric geometric shapes, which are highly efficient at killing bacteria. In their attempt to understand these forms and reproduce them as new anti-bacterial materials, a team consisting of Vladimir Baulin, Marc Werner, from the Leibniz-Institut für Polymerforschung (Dresden, Germany) and Elena Ivanova from the Australian university RMIT, discovered that the elasticity of nanopillars is a key factor because they can retain and release sufficient energy to kill the bacteria.
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Source: Phys.org