Research Projects

The rapid industrialisation has resulted in significantly higher production of plastic waste, severely impacting the environment and prompting the government of India to devise legislation for its strict regulation. Progress on producing functional materials using plastic waste as feedstocks is limited, but can be highly beneficial. Carbon-dots are a new class of nanomaterials with many beneficial characteristics such as high specific surface area, reactivity, low toxicity, good biocompatibility, and unique physicochemical properties, garnering tremendous recent research interest. In this context, notably, a strategy to prepare carbon dots from plastics, with the benefits of complete plastic conversion, reagent recyclability and large-scale production has been developed by the host PI of this application and patented, which will be explored further during the execution of this proposal for commercial and other potent antibacterial drug molecule production. Synthesizing new drugs using waste-driven nanomaterials could significantly make a positive impact on human health and the environment. It is worth emphasizing that there is an increasing demand to develop such new antibiotics owing to the rising frequency of bacterial resistance to antibiotics. For example, Penicillin was introduced in 1940, but saw a whopping 80% of Staphylococcus aureus becoming resistant to it by the 1960s. Despite significant progress made so far in developing antibiotic synthesis protocols, the traditional approaches have a few critical and emerging limitations, green-ness quotient in particular, arising from tedious preparation, difficulty in purification, and lower yield. During this proposal, focus will be given on photo-synthesising (i) commercial and (ii) potent quinazolinone-triazole based antimicrobial agents using plastic-derived carbon dots and ambient sunlight, followed by scaling up of the process, for the first time. Quinazolinone and triazole-containing moieties are chosen because of their attractive stability against metabolic degradation and potential to diversify our approach to other pharmaceuticals based on these nitrogen-containing heterocycles, including anticancer, antiviral, antifungal, antibacterial compounds, etc. A key challenge in this program will be to bring the carbon dots to a non-aqueous media, not achieved for any kind of carbon dots by anyone so far, for which the initial results have already been obtained. Further, the synthesized compounds will be evaluated for antimicrobial activities. Overall, success in this proposal will open up a new and sustainable approach where not only waste plastic will be upcycled, but also, a robust way of solar-driven, nearly CO2-neutral, quinazolinone-triazole hybrid-based pharmaceutical production will be accomplished at 50 g-scale towards supporting the Make in India initiative by the Govt of India.