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Antibiotic resistance is an increasing public health problem that affects to numerous pathogens, including Staphylococcus pseudintermedius, which has a high prevalence of methicillin resistance and can be transmitted to humans. The development of new compounds to prevent the appearance of antibiotic resistances and find alternatives to classic therapies is essential to health protection. The main objective of the present study is to determine whether the nanoparticles of polyvinyl alcohol and tannic acid “PVA-TA NPs” are effective to inhibit Staphylococcus pseudintermedius and can be considered as an alternative therapy. The study includes increasing concentration essays of the nanoparticles and establishes, using the determination of turbidity by refractometry that could be a useful tool to inhibit bacterial growth, resulting successful. Nonetheless, further studies to identify the underlying action mechanisms of these nano-particles are going on in our group.

A high number of pathogens have shown the capacity of resist to the action of antibiotics. This fact presents a very important problem to public health and highlights the necessity of looking for new substances as alternative to antibiotics. Since some of these substances have a hydrophobic nature they need to be solved in organic solvents. Some of these solvents are also toxic to bacteria, mainly affecting membranes. For these reasons it is necessary to perform a study of the toxicity of organic solvents to bacteria, which has been the aim of this work. Five organic solvents, DMF (dimethylformamide), TBME (tert-butyl methyl ether), THF (tetrahydrofuran), DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide) and CH2Cl2 (dichloromethane), have been tested, using two of the most prevalent pathogens (Staphylococcus pseudintermedius and Pseudomonas aeruginosa,) both in animals and humans. The results show that, when possible, DMSO followed by TBME are the best options for testing new compounds in Staphylococcus pseudintermedius, whether DMF followed by TBME are the preferred solvents for testing hydrophobic compounds in Pseudomonas aeruginosa.