In-vitro synergistic microbicidal and catalytic evaluation of polyvinylpyrrolidone/chitosan doped tungsten trioxide nanoplates with evidential in-silico analysis

In this research, hydrothermally synthesized tungsten trioxide (WO₃) nanocomposites doped polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) and chitosan (CS) were studied. Various concentrations (3, 6, and 9 wt%) of PVP were doped into a fixed amount of binary system (CS-WO₃) nanocomposites. PVP/CS polymers showed attractive attention because of their different structure, functionality, and architecture control as dopant to WO₃. The PVP/CS encapsulates the WO₃ (ternary composite), which controls crystallite size (band gap reduction), rapidly overcomes the recombination electron-hole pairs issues, and generates the active sites, resulting in improved catalytic and antimicrobial activity. The synthesized nanocomposites revealed significant catalytic efficiency and methylene blue (MB) dye depletion of 99.9 % in the presence of reducing agent (NaBH₄) in neutral and acidic media. Antimicrobial effectiveness of produced nanostructures towards Escherichia coli (E. coli) pathogen at low and high concentrations were investigated by Vernier caliper in mm. Furthermore, to their microbicidal action, docking experiments of CS-doped WO₃ and PVP/CS-doped WO₃ nanostructures for DHFR and FabI of Escherichia coli suggested blockage of aforesaid enzymes as the plausible pathway.