The escalating global crisis of antimicrobial resistance urgently demands innovative antimicrobial agents beyond conventional antibiotics. Metal-based nanomaterials, including metal/metal oxide nanoparticles (NPs) and metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), represent a promising class of broad-spectrum antibacterial agents. However, their practical application is often hindered by intrinsic limitations such as aggregation, instability, and cytotoxicity. Integrating them with structurally and chemically tunable silica nanoparticles has been demonstrated as a promising strategy to mitigate the limitations and engineer advanced nanohybrids with synergistic functionalities. This review highlights how tailored interfacial chemistry achieves precise architectural control over silica&metal-based nanohybrids. The controlled nanoarchitecture is essential to fully exploit the structural and functional contributions of silica components to overcome the physiochemical limitations of meta-based material. We then examine the biological performance of these heterostructures mainly in antibacterial fields, including membrane disruption, stimuli-responsive activation, biofilm penetration/eradication, and receptor-mediated active targeting to pathogenic bacteria. Finally, challenges and future research directions are outlined based on our own perspectives, providing a design framework for next-generation antimicrobial nanotherapeutics.
Cheng et al. (Tue,) studied this question.