Near infrared photothermal inactivation of Candida albicans assisted by plasmonic nanorods

The use of photothermal processes has been proven effective in the control of microbial infections. Simultaneously, the localized surface plasmon resonance phenomena in metallic nanoparticles have been explored as an alternative strategy to achieve highly efficient localized heating. In this work, we propose the use of selected nanoheaters to improve the efficiency of fungal photothermal inactivation of Candida albicans through size optimization of plasmonic gold nanorods. Here, the optical heating of polyethylene glycol coated gold nanorods of varying sizes is evaluated, both theoretically and experimentally. A size-dependent computational approach was applied to identify metallic nanorods with maximized thermal performance at 800 nm, followed by the experimental comparison of optimal and suboptimal nanoheaters. Comparison among samples show temperatures of up to $53.0$ °C for $41\times 10$ nm gold nanorods against $32.3$ °C for $90\times 25$ nm, a percentage increase of $\sim$63% in photothermal inactivation assessments. Our findings reveal that gold nanorods of $41\times 10$ nm exhibit superior efficiency in near-infrared (800 nm) photothermal inactivation of fungi, owing to their higher light-thermal conversion efficiency. The identification of high performance metallic nanoheaters may lead to the reduction of the nanoparticle dose used in plasmonic-based procedures and decrease the laser exposure time needed to induce cell death. Moreover, our results provide insights to better exploit plasmonic nanoparticles on photothermal inactivation protocols.