Characterization and antipathogenic evaluation of a novel quaternary phosphonium tripolyacrylamide and elucidation of the inactivation mechanisms.

To mitigate the crisis of pathogen-caused disease outbreaks, developing novel disinfection agents with broad-spectrum antipathogenic performance is a severe task. In this work, an antipathogenic tripolyacrylamide containing aliphatic quaternary phosphonium salt (QPS) was prepared. To confirm the broad-spectrum antipathogenic activity of the as-prepared polymer, the in vitro antibacterial performance was evaluated against Escherichia coli (E. coli) and Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) and viral inactivation was assessed against influenza virus and adenovirus as well. The polymers exhibited higher bactericidal activity against S. aureus than E. coli in terms of minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC), while possessing much lower MIC values compared with their corresponding compound. The morphological alterations in polymer treated E. coli, captured by atomic force microscopy, confirmed the membrane-acting antibacterial mechanism of polymeric QPS. The plaque reduction assay performed on influenza virus and adenovirus demonstrated the as-prepared tripolymer could efficiently inactivate both enveloped and non-enveloped viruses, and the two different antiviral mechanisms were elucidated correspondingly.