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Applied and Environmental Microbiology, November 2004, p. 6453-6458, Vol. 70, No. 11
0099-2240/04/$08.00+0     DOI: 10.1128/AEM.70.11.6453-6458.2004
Copyright © 2004, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.

Use of Merocyanine 540 for Photodynamic Inactivation of Staphylococcus aureus Planktonic and Biofilm Cells

Institute of Microbiology and Biochemistry,¹ Center for Optoelectronic Biomedicine, College of Medicine,² Department of Biochemical Science and Technology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China³

Received 25 February 2004/ Accepted 25 June 2004

Photodynamic inactivation of Staphylococcus aureus planktonic and biofilm cells by a phtotosensitizer, merocyanine 540 (MC 540), was investigated. For the planktonic experiments, MC 540 binding efficiency to bacterial cells was found to increase with both increasing MC 540 concentration and increasing incubation time, but the binding became saturated following 10 min of incubation. The antimicrobial activity was enhanced with an increasing light dose, but an increase in the light dose could not further improve the antimicrobial activity if the maximum excitation level attainable was less than the necessary minimum threshold level. Complete inactivation was achieved when the excitation level of MC 540 was somewhere above the threshold level. The relationship between antimicrobial activity and the excitation level of MC 540 revealed that the more MC 540 was excited, the more S. aureus cells were killed. For the biofilm experiments, the antimicrobial activity was enhanced with an increase in the light dose. No viable cells were detected when organisms were exposed to 15 µg of MC 540 per ml and a light dose of 600 J/cm² or to 20 µg of MC 540 per ml and a light dose of 450 J/cm². A quantitative analysis of MC 540 bound to biofilms was also performed, and the images from confocal laser scanning microscopy provided direct evidence that revealed the difference between the MC 540 remaining in the biofilms prior to irradiation and the MC 540 remaining in the biofilms after irradiation. The results of both the planktonic and biofilm experiments suggest that the antimicrobial activity of photodynamic inactivation of S. aureus is closely related to the excitation level of MC 540.

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