Highly efficient gold nanorods assisted laser phototherapy for rapid treatment on mice wound infected by pathogenic bacteria

• MALDI-MS spectra used in understanding the condition of wound and infection.
• Effective treatment for controlling infection.
• Use gold nanorods and Nd-YAG laser.

Treatment of wound infection is one of the most challenging problems to be addressed in infectiously microbiological world. This is mainly due to the pathogen's ability for fast mutation and generating severely antibiotic resistance to antimicrobial treatment. Pathogens causing wound infection treated by photothermal methods can avoid drug resistance problem. Beside, rapid and highly effective wound treatment method in modern medical technology is extremely required. Therefore, we have proposed a novel method by using gold nanorods (Au NRs) to assist the Nd-YAG laser (1064 nm) for photothermal killing pathogenic bacteria (Pseudomonas aeruginosa) for directly healing the wound infection on the (albino) mice. In all experiments, the bacteria numbers were calculated by the plate count method and we also used MALDI-MS to evaluate the effectiveness of the treatment and the physiological condition of wound infection. The current approach can be used to control severe skin infections from antibiotic resistant pathogens in wounds.

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