ABSTRACT
The increasing production and use of nanomaterials (NMs) have led to concerns about their potential impacts on the environment and human health. Bacteria, which are ubiquitous on earth, play a key role in the ecosystem and may be influenced by these NMs. Understanding the interactions between NMs and bacteria will facilitate the safety evaluation of NMs. In this chapter, we summarize the current understanding of toxicity and potential antibacterial mechanisms of carbon-, metal-, and metal oxide-based NMs to bacteria. In order to correctly evaluate the antibacterial properties of NMs, the reliability of assay methods is also discussed. However, there are still many controversial results, which require us to analyze the weaknesses of the proposed mechanisms and supply some new insights into the remaining perspectives and challenges for future work.
