Many wound dressings fight infection with silver nanoparticles, which are tiny particles of silver.
They often contain a lot of it, which adds cost, can make the particles clump together, and raises
safety concerns. Eknoor Kaur Sandhu (Class XII) wanted to find out whether a dressing could work
with much less.
In Dr. Rucha Joshi’s laboratory at Plaksha University, she made a soft gel from the protein in
silkworm cocoons and mixed in a small amount of silver.
She then grew bacteria on laboratory plates and measured how well the gel stopped them. The gel with
little silver worked just as well as silver on its own, and adding 500 times more silver gave no
extra benefit. The team’s next steps are to study how the silver leaves the gel and to check that it
is safe for human cells.
Eknoor is first author of the research paper, which is now under review at the Journal of Emerging
Investigators.