Synergistic Antimicrobial Capability of Magnetically Oriented Graphene Oxide Conjugated with Gold Nanoclusters

Bacterial resistance toward antibiotics has been a worldwide threat; one way to fight against the resistance is to develop a multimechanism antibacterial agent to achieve synergistic performance. Graphene oxide (GO) is an emerging antibacterial agent combining multiple mechanisms (physical insertion and chemical disruption), and its rich functional groups enable the complexation/conjugation of nanomaterials to further improve antibacterial performance. Herein, a synergistic antimicrobial agent is established through the assembly of paramagnetic holmium ions and gold nanoclusters (AuNCs) onto GO nanosheets. The assembled nanosheets can be vertically aligned under weak and practical magnetic fields (