Sustainable Antimicrobial Polymer Technology for Application in Consumer Products

The objective of this project is to develop active antimicrobial compounds that exhibit fast bactericidal effect against Escherichia coli (E. coli ATCC® 8739™) in the presence of commercial liquid laundry detergent. The preliminary goal is to discover novel antimicrobial agents which possess greater than 99 % killing (≥ 2 log10 reduction) of E. coli within 10-min treatment at the concentration of ≤ 50 ppm. In the past years, we worked on the project and reached each milestone according to the schedule. The major accomplishment we made is that we developed PIM polymers and discovered that ultralow molecular weight (ULMW, 2 kDa) PIM combined with branched PEI can kill E. coli more than 2 orders ( 2.5 log10 reduction). Besides PIM polymers, we developed poly(lysine)-b-poly(leucine) block copolymer, PAMPTMA and its block copolymer, and chitosan-zein nanoparticals which exhibit promising antimicrobial activity in suspension test. In this project, we have published one paper and files one patent.