Wound Coating Collagen-Based Composites with Ag Nanoparticles: Synthesis, Structure and Biological Activity

The search for materials for a new generation of wound coatings is important due to the increase in antibiotic-resistant microorganisms and the number of patients with untreatable chronic purulent wounds. Metal nanoparticles, specifically silver nanoparticles, have antimicrobial activity and do not induce known bacterial resistance. To obtain new Ag-containing nanocomposites, type I collagen was extracted by an enzyme–acid method from cattle tendons. Silver nanoparticles were obtained by an environmentally safe method, metal-vapor synthesis (MVS), which enables obtaining metal nanoparticles without impurities. For this, metal vapors were cocondensed in a vacuum of 10−2 Pa on the walls of a quartz reactor cooled to 77 K using acetone as an organic dispersion medium. The composition of the collagen surface was determined by XPS using the spectra of C1s, N1s, and O1s. The presence of a peak with a binding energy of approximately 368.57 eV in the Ag 3d5/2 spectrum indicates the state of Ag0 silver atoms in the nanocomposite. SEM images showed that collagen contributes to the effective stabilization of Ag nanoparticles with an average size of 13.0 ± 3.5 nm. It was found that collagen is non-toxic and biocompatible with skin cells and fibroblasts. The collagen–Ag nanoparticle nanocomposites exhibited antimicrobial activity against bacteria Bacillus subtilis, Escherichia coli, and fungi Aspergillus niger.