ABSTRACT
The growing world population is facing challenges like energy crisis, environmental sustainability, global public health problems, etc. Among these, the resolution of public health issue is of prime importance for the people to live happily and enjoy each moment of their life. However, various diseases such as diabetes mellitus, HIV, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, stroke, and other neurological diseases have no permanent cure yet. New life-threatening diseases and viruses like COVID-19, Zika, Ebola, SARS, MERS and H1N1 etc. are affecting humans, which lead to loss of life. through Early diagnosis, proper medical treatment and accessible health monitoring systems can be both life saving and cost saving for the patients. Particularly, biosensing protocols in connection to early diagnosis as well as health monitoring have placed a significant importance in biomedical sector. In the current context where population and bio-testing capacity have a remarkable gap, the effect of prompt and specific detection of target molecules is also important from the point of view of biosensor field. Hence, the development of biomedical sensors having the features such as easy to handle, cost effective, short time span for analysis, multianalyte sensing, sophisticated digital display, etc. are the need of hour. For example, glucometer is a well-known example of biosensor device;glucometer measures the sugar content present in blood sample. Similarly, various sensors such as glucowatch, tooth enamel biosensor, colorimetric sweat biosensor, etc. have wide application in biosensing for the analysis of different biomolecules. © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Similar to the pandemic COVID-19 situations, the world has been facing various infections due to innumerable pathogenic microbes in living organisms, which puts many challenges in front of policymakers, scientists, and governments as well. Among the different strategies to control infection-causing agents, the demand to develop biostatic or biocidal coatings is increasing dramatically. In addition, numerous companies have been marketing the various antimicrobial ways for inactivating or reducing infectious microbes. Among the different types of antimicrobial coatings, surface coating is one of the promising strategies to disinfect the surfaces of various objects or tools used in hospitals, homes, etc. In comparison to organic- or polymer-based agents, metal oxide nanocomposites have been emerged as antimicrobial materials because of their overriding advantages such as higher surface area, excellent stability, non-toxicity, reasonable cost, chemical inertness, etc., which leads to higher activity toward the microbes inactivation through reactive oxygen species generation, ease penetration, well integrity, etc. With these objectives, this chapter discusses the metal oxide nanocomposites-based antimicrobial coatings for controlling the microbes observed on the surfaces of objects used in different sectors, such as hospitals, paints, automobiles, food, etc. Accordingly, this chapter describes the basics of nanocomposites, antimicrobial coatings, characterizing composites, biological measurements for antimicrobial coatings used in various fields up to the future perspectives of nanocomposites-based antimicrobial coatings. Therefore, metal oxide nanocomposites-based antimicrobial coatings can be used effectively to control the microbial proliferation of various objects, devices used in common places of high-risk infections. © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.