As bacteria and viruses threaten people's health and life all the time, the development and research of various antibacterial materials have been going on for many years [
1]. Through the continuous efforts of researchers, a variety of antimicrobial agents have emerged such as free halogen [
2], metal oxide [
3], quaternary ammonium salt (QAs) [
4], peptide [
5], guanidine and
N-halamines [
6], graphene oxide (GO) is also one of them. However, the antibacterial mechanism of an antimicrobial agent is generally single [
7]. Although GO has been found to have a variety of bactericidal mechanisms, such as oxidative stress, physical/mechanical damage, photothermal/photocatalytic effect [
8], inhibition of bacterial metabolism, lipid extraction and isolation by wrapping [
9]. Its bactericidal efficacy still needs to be improved [
10]. The compound use of a variety of antimicrobial agents to obtain stronger germicidal efficacy has become an important way to prepare high-efficiency antibacterial materials [
11]. In recent years, GO has been widely used in the fields of antibacterial action [
12], bio detection [
13], cancer treatment [
14], drug [
15] and gene delivery [
16] because of its unique physical and chemical properties, such as wide surface area, excellent electrical conductivity, thermal conductivity and bio-compatibility [
17].
N-Halamine has also become a concerned antimicrobial agent because of its unique high biocidal efficacy and recharge ability. Because of its oxidizing properties, halogens in the N-X (X = Cl, Br, I) bond could provide high bactericidal activity by releasing bactericidal ions [
18]. As soon as the halogen is released from the N-X bond, it can be charged by rehalogenation again [
19]. Yang et al. found GO loaded with cuprous oxide nanoparticles, which was long-term antibacterial stable [
3]. The antibacterial effect of these composites is much higher than that of single GO or single component, and has a synergistic bactericidal mechanism. Quaternarized
N-halamines were synthesized by combining QAs with
N-halamines, which can improve the bactericidal properties of materials by synergies of contact sterilization and release sterilization [
20]. QAs is also a widely used antimicrobial agent with high positive charge. It can strongly attract the negatively charged bacteria on the surface, change the permeability of the cell membrane [
21], and make the outflow of cell contents, which leads to contact killing. It is expected to design a multi-way synergistic sterilization of quaternarized
N-halamine-grafted GO. For the purpose of realizing the above hypothesis, quaternarized
N-halamine was grafted on GO to enrich the bactericidal pathway and improve the bactericidal efficacy. Using GO nanosheets as polymer back bones, poly(4-vinylpyridine) (P-4VP) grafted GO was synthesized by
in-situ radical polymerization (ISRP). Large specific surface area provided more reaction sites and then 3-bromopropyl-5-5-dimethylhydantoin (BHD) was grafted by quaternization reaction to complete the preparation of quaternarized
N-halamine grafted GO as shown in
Scheme 1. In this contribution, combining with "release-kill" and "contact-kill" methods, the bactericidal efficacy of the material on
Escherichia coli (
E. coli)
and Staphylococcus aureus (
S. aureus) represented by Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria was studied. The synergistic effect was further investigated.