Investigating cytotoxicity and the effect of Zn doped CeO2 nanoparticles on tooth-damaging Streptococcus mutans bacteria

The present study presents a simple method for the provision of pure and 5% zinc doped cerium oxide nanoparticles (Zn-CeO2-NP) through application of extraction from prosopis fracta. In the following, we determined the physical-chemical properties of the product by performance of FESEM, UV-Vis, PXRD, and EDX devices. The finding of PXRD and EDX thoroughly confirmed the existence of zinc inside the structure of CeO2-NP, while results of FESEM measured the particle sizes of pure and doped NP to be below 20 and 10 nm. An assessment was conducted on the cytotoxic performance of synthesized samples on colon cancer (HT-29) cell line through usage of MTT test. According to results, doping process caused an increase in the cytotoxic effect of CeO2-NP. The next section involved the evaluation of obtained antibacterial activity on Streptococcus mutans bacteria via micro-dilution, hence resulted in displaying higher antibacterial activity of doped NP than to pure CeO2-NP.