Antibacterial Effect of Zinc Oxide Nanoparticles on Drug Resistant E. coli Isolated from Chicken with a Zoonotic Perspective

Abstract

Escherichia coli (E. coli) infection has significant public health impact on both chickens and human. Antibiotic resistance as well as antibiotic residues in chicken meat are some of the negative outcomes of the traditional antibiotic-based approach to prevent and control bacterial infections. Therefore, the main goal of current investigation was to control the drug-resistant E. coli O6 infection using nano-production of zinc oxide (ZnO-NPs) in both in vitro and vivo studies. ZnO-NPs was applied in one day old specific pathogen free chicks to evaluate the antibacterial effectiveness of 50mg/kg ration dosage compared with colistin as commercial antibiotic at 5 days old. E. coli serotype O6 was the highest prevalent and pathogenic multi drug resistant bacterial strain.The assessment parameters were clinical signs, post-mortem lesions and histopathological picture which showed effective role of ZnO-NPs as bacterial inhibitor in the treated groups compared to control one. Quantitative analysis showed that ZnO-NPs significantly lowered gross lesion scores in the liver, cecum, colon, spleen, heart, and lungs compared to the E. coli-infected group. These findings solidified our central hypothesis which was to evaluate the antimicrobial and antioxidant efficacy of ZnO-NPs against pathogenic bacterial strain of E. coli in broiler chicken as a powerful, safe alternative to antibiotics.